determinism and free will

There is the objection that determinism means that people don’t actually choose what they do, and hence one can’t make deep moral judgments about them or oneself. It’s as if someone took my arm and hit you with it. It’s not my doing, so I don’t deserve the blame (or praise). In a deterministic universe, the subject is almost a passive observer.

One response is that moral judgments aren’t just about actions, they are about character, motives, and good will. If one has a good heart, one deserves praise even if one was born with it or developed it through experience in a determined universe.

Second, I think it is enough when making a deep moral judgment that one could say that another person would have been less good or less bad. True, the act itself had to happen given all that came before, but that is because the actor is the kind of person the actor is. If Jane “must” do good works instead of sit around and drink beer, that says something morally praiseworthy about the kind person Jane is.

Third, I don’t think there’s the tension between free will and determinism as is sometimes made out by advocates of free will. Whether one is in a determined universe or a non-determined universe, one’s will is going to depend on the kind of person one is and the circumstances one is in. Only schizophrenics have real choices in such matters.

Fourth, absence of free will usually means that someone else's will is substituted for our own. In a religious context, it would be God (though he famously declined). But in a determined universe, no one else is in charge of us. We are who we are, and make the decisions we do, because of genetics, environment, experience, etc. That is, exactly the same as in the kind of universe we think we live in.