Hard determinism

In ancient Greece, Socrates initiated the rationalistic teaching that any agent is obliged to pursue the chief good conceived by his or her mind.

[4] Strato of Lampsacus speculated that an unconscious divine power acts in the world and causes the origin, growth, and breakdown of things.

[6] Chrysippus of Soli refuted the "idle argument" invented to discredit determinism as if human efforts were futile in a preordained world; he explained that fated events occur with the engagement of conscious agents.

Krishna, the personification of Godhead, says to Arjuna in the verse 13.30: They alone truly see who understand that all actions (of the body) are performed by material nature, while the self actually does nothing.In the 17th century, both John Locke[8] and Baruch Spinoza[9] argued for strict causality of volitional acts.

[13] Recently, Daniel Wegner stressed the limitations of free will on grounds of experimental evidence for unconscious choice and action.

[14] To prove determinism, the following putative experiment was proposed: all principal differences between the features of an artificial zygote and that developing naturally can be avoided.

[15] Meeting a challenge, agents make decisions in conformity to the inherited character, life history, and current stimuli.

However, if the total of the mental content is considered from the third person's perspective, only a single decision deemed by the agent as the most favorable at the moment turns out real.

One example is the "Best Standards Analysis", which says that the laws are only useful ways to summarize all past events, rather than there being metaphysically "pushy" entities (this route still brings one into conflict with the idea of free will).

Andreas Albrecht of Imperial College in London called it a "provocative" solution to one of the central problems facing physics.

Yet chaos theory is a wholly deterministic thesis; it merely demonstrates the potential for vastly different consequences from very similar initial conditions.

The key to this argument rests on the idea that holding a person morally responsible requires them to make a choice between two, or more, truly possible alternatives.

As scientific insight advances, the juridical attitude becomes increasingly "external": there should be fewer emotions about offender's will and more concern about the effects of offenses on society.

At the same time, it is justified to require the perpetrator to critically reconsider his intentions and character, to demand apology and compensation in victims' favor.

James was careful to explain that he would rather "debate about objects than words", which indicates he did not insist on saying that replacing determinism with a model including chance had to mean we had "free will."

Admitting agents' dependence on a drastic background can enhance insight, moderate severity and spare unproductive suffering.