Consequently, according to this view the destiny of each of us is set before we
are born.
400
Several thinkers and schools of thought have taken a determinist view. For
example Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), taking up the ideas of philosophers
such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), formulated the principle that humans
are moved by two basic forces, the desire to obtain pleasure and the need to
avoid pain. Following the experimental work of the Russian physiologist Ivan
Pavlov (1849-1936), and through the research of John Watson (1878-1958)
and Burrhus F Skinner (1904-1990), this idea later received expression as an
influential theory in psychology called behaviourism. On this basis people can
be manipulated to behave in set ways according to their desire to obtain
pleasure and their need to avoid pain
Resolution
Determinism makes for good social science because, if behaviour is
determined, there are laws of human behaviour to be found and studied. Yet
social science in this form comes at a price because determinism in its extreme
form eliminates all idea of moral responsibility. Only when a human makes a
free choice to do or not to do something (as voluntarism propounds) can we
make any moral judgment of them for having performed or not performed an
action.
401
Thus determinism wipes out free will and moral responsibility, while
voluntarism wipes out social planning and behavioural science. A possible
resolution is
a middle view which is some sort of compromise between the
two extreme positions. This view is labelled compatibilism. Humans have free
will. Therefore they can make choices and thus be morally responsible. Yet in
making their choices they will be influenced by various personal and social
factors, so that a soft determinism prevails. Given that these personal and
social factors are shared by many, people sometimes or even often behave in
reasonably predictable ways. For this reason we can still have behavioural
science.
The beauty of the middle view is that it accommodates both ethics and
behavioural science. It also squares with ordinary concepts as to how people
___________________
400
This notion is memorably captured in the
following lines from the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LIII, (rendered into English
by Edward
FitzGerald): “With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's knead, And then of
the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed: Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote What the
Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read”.
401
As Miller (1978) p 12 puts it, with determinism “all values in ethics, logic
and aesthetics disappear”.
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