Soft Determinism, Hard Determinism, Necessitarianism, Fatalism...Huh?

[Angrboda]

I think what hangs most people up about hard determinism is not that we aren't ultimately free, anybody who is not a child already acknowledges this. I think most people get stuck on swallowing hard determinism because of what they see as the consequences of the position, the loss of existential meaning, the abandonment of traditional concepts of justice and morality, the loss of the notion of moral dessert, losing a sense of ownership of one's actions. It's like nihilism to most people, they don't see anyway to avoid the conclusion, but they find the emotional and philosophical consequences of embracing the viewpoint to be daunting. (I don't agree with nihilism, but it's a very well accepted position by many.) Hard determinism is similar in that people don't mind embracing the limitations on their freedom so much as the consequences that seem to flow from embracing that position. I say "seem to flow" because I think many of the fears are bogeyman created by letting go of free will with one hand, but not letting go of traditional frameworks with the other hand.

Off the top of my head, I think compatibilism could be refashioned into a defensible position, but its advocates want too much from it. They want to do the one-hand hang, giving up some of the traditional metaphysics and concepts, but remodeling only certain parts so that it looks like nothing has been changed. I think, at minimum, this is too ambitious a goal. You're going to have to redraw much of the rest of the map to bring determinism into the heart of being, you can't just change the central linchpin into something resembling the old concept, and still hold everything else in place. So you end up with philosophers like Dennett trying to bridge the gap with hand-waving, and it just doesn't work. The illusion may charm for a while, but eventually the mirror breaks from the strain. If compatibilists would accept a more radical redrawing of concepts and consequences, perhaps compatibilism could be made consistent. With what compatibilists want to do though, I don't think it will ever work. And those things eventually come out in the wash in philosophy, so today's compatibilism may very well just be "a phase" on the way to something else.