Soft Determinism

Soft Determinism

Stace's theory of compatibilism has to deal with free will and its consistency with determinism. Soft determinism is the thought that coherent humans should be held responsible for their actions if those actions were voluntary. Actions can be both free and determined while still having the ability to be held as morally responsible. Hard determinism on the other hand states that every action is caused therefore making a person unable to be held responsible for anything they may do.

Free will is all about having the choice to act on what a person wants to voluntarily do. To be determined is to already have an action planned out or decided. So how do both of these actions go together? An action can be determined and still acted on freely. If I go outside and roll around in a puddle of mud it is determined that I will go take a shower, but I will freely take that shower. Even if I did not roll around in a puddle of mud I would still take a shower sometime throughout the day. So in that scenario, the act of taking a shower was determined and free. When it comes to an action being morally right or wrong, free will and determinism are key factors in deciding a punishment. If a person freely out of pure hatred commits a murder than the act is morally wrong but if that same person was hypnotized the action became determined and no longer free therefore making the action wrong but not morally wrong for the hypnotized person. Now lets say that the person who committed the murder had grown up hearing how bad and terrible the victim was, the murder may then be determined and free and therefore the person should still be held morally responsible for that action. Soft determinism works with the facts that as long as a person is acting freely they willingly do what they have been caused to do. An objection to this is the theory of hard determinism by D'Holbach.

I completely disagree with hard determinism. I think it is extremely wrong that any person and their actions cannot be held responsible for due to