Predeterminism is the philosophy that all events of history, past, present and future, have been already decided or are already known (by God, fate, or some other force), including human actions.
[1] The concept of predeterminism is often argued by invoking causal determinism, implying that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to infinity.
[7] Predeterminism is difficult to discuss because its simple definition can logically lead to a variety of similar, complex (and, perhaps, better defined) concepts in metaphysics, theology, and the philosophy of free will.
Predeterminism necessarily implies, at the very least, a passive but all-knowing observer, if not an active planner, designer, or manipulator (of the fetus's personal characteristics).
This creates a definitional conflict because predeterminism, by this understanding, logically leads to a belief in the existence of a conscious being who must determine all actions and events in advance and who, possessing such seeming omnipotence, almost certainly operates outside of the laws of nature.
Predestination asserts that a supremely powerful being has, in advance, fixed all events and outcomes in the universe; it is a famous doctrine of the Calvinists in Christian theology.
Likewise, the doctrine of fatalism already explicitly attributes all events and outcomes to the will of a (vaguer) higher power such as fate or destiny.
Nearly 25 years after James' death, R. E. Hobart published a short article in Mind in 1934 that is considered one of the definitive statements of determinism and compatibilism.
[8] Hobart's compatibilism was similar to earlier landmark positions by Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, as refined in the 19th-century compatibilist views of John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and F. H. Bradley.
Nevertheless, she criticized arguments that free will requires indeterminism, and in particular the idea that one could not be held responsible for "chance" actions chosen for no particular reason.
To say that a man acted freely is, it is often suggested, to say that he was not constrained, or that he could have done otherwise if he had chosen, or something else of that kind; and since these things could be true even if his action was determined it seems that there could be room for free will even within a universe completely subject to causal laws.