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COMPATIBILITY OF FREE WILL AND CAUSAL NECESSITY

Abstract

The dilemma of determinism concerns the inevitability, predictability and determination of human action and the challenge posed by the uncertainty principle and the relativity theory. “Necessity is the idea that everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is necessary and is opposed to chance and contingency”: there is no chance in a necessary world. Causal determinism, however, fails to take account of the question raised by Peirce and James “whether man’s nature is at one with the material, causal world, or whether a person can make decisions and choices of his own volition”. The scientific findings of Einstein and Heisenberg as well as the Chaos Theory seem to support the later thesis. There have, indeed, been significant attempts to reconcile the ideas of “causation” and “free will”. Hume, however, thinks that causation was not mere succession of events. The conjunction points to a necessary connection as well as a constant conjunction. His principle of causality says that nothing could arise without a cause and conceived “causal necessity as a “projection” of the functional change onto the objects involved in the causal connection”. The paper concludes with the claim that though latter in his writings Hume tried to make liberty and necessity compatible with one another, hard determinism still rules out this possibility by claiming that human beings are the part of nature and their actions should not be treated as exception from rest of the nature. The whole nature is knitted in one causal chain of necessity

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