If our choices are determined by causes beyond us, can we really be held morally responsible for what we do?
Free will and moral responsibility, including hard determinism, libertarianism and compatibilism (soft determinism), and the religious idea of predestination.
An AQA A-Level Religious Studies answer to free will and moral responsibility, covering hard determinism, libertarianism, compatibilism (soft determinism) and religious predestination, and their implications for moral responsibility.
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What this dot point is asking
AQA wants you to explain the debate about free will and moral responsibility: hard determinism, libertarianism and compatibilism (soft determinism), together with the religious idea of predestination, and to evaluate what each implies for holding people morally responsible.
Hard determinism
Support comes from physical and psychological causation: behaviourism (Skinner) treats behaviour as conditioned by stimulus and response, and genetics and upbringing shape character. Clarence Darrow famously used hard determinism in the Leopold and Loeb trial to argue that the defendants were the product of their heredity and environment and so could not be held fully responsible for the murder. The cost of hard determinism is steep: praise, blame and retributive punishment lose their moral basis, since you cannot fairly blame someone for what they could not avoid; at most punishment could be justified as deterrence or reform, not desert. Many also find it impossible to live as if no choice were really free.
Libertarianism
Libertarians appeal to the experience of deliberation and choice, and some (following Kant) distinguish the phenomenal self (the empirical person, subject to causal laws) from the noumenal self (the rational moral agent who is genuinely free). The challenge is the dilemma of determinism: if a choice is fully caused it is not free, but if it is uncaused it is merely random, and a random choice is no more "mine" or responsible than a determined one, so it is hard to see how libertarian freedom is anything more than chance.
Compatibilism and predestination
Critics object that compatibilism merely redefines the problem away: even if I act on my own desires, those desires were themselves caused, so I could not ultimately have desired otherwise, and "acting freely" in this sense is compatible with my will having been wholly programmed.
Religiously, predestination (Augustine and especially Calvin's doctrine of unconditional election, that God has eternally chosen the saved) holds that God determines who is saved, raising the problem of reconciling divine foreknowledge and grace with human freedom and just judgement: if God foreknows and ordains all, how can humans be free, and how can God justly condemn anyone? Arminian and free-will responses argue God's foreknowledge does not cause our choices, while Boethius distinguished God's timeless "seeing" of events from causally determining them.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of AQA exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
AQA 20185 marksExplain the difference between hard determinism and compatibilism (soft determinism).Show worked answer →
A 5-mark Paper 2 (Ethics) AO1 question. Markers want both positions stated and the contrast drawn precisely.
Both accept universal causation: every event, including human choice, is fully caused by prior conditions. Hard determinism concludes that genuine free will is therefore an illusion and no one is ultimately morally responsible, so praise, blame and retributive punishment lose their basis. Compatibilism (soft determinism), associated with Hume, redefines freedom: to be free is to act according to your own desires without external constraint or coercion, even though those desires are themselves caused. So a determined action can still be free and responsible if it flows from the agent's own will. Strong answers note the key difference is over the definition of freedom, not over whether causation is universal.
AQA 202120 marks'If determinism is true, no one can be held morally responsible for their actions.' Assess this view.Show worked answer →
A 20-mark Paper 2 essay, mainly AO2. Reward a balanced argument across the three positions and the religious dimension.
Set out hard determinism (Darrow, behaviourism), libertarianism and compatibilism, plus religious predestination (Augustine, Calvin). Evaluate the claim. For: if every choice is fully caused we could not have done otherwise, so blame seems unfair (the hard determinist conclusion). Against: compatibilism preserves responsibility by redefining freedom as acting on one's own desires; libertarianism denies that the moral self is fully determined; and our whole practice of holding people responsible presupposes some freedom. Weigh predestination, which sharpens the problem for theists who also believe in just divine judgement. Judge, for example, that compatibilism best saves responsibility, so the claim holds only on a hard-determinist definition of freedom. Top-band work shows the dispute turns on what "freedom" means.
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Sources & how we know this
- AQA A-level Religious Studies (7062) specification — AQA (2016)