Topics Freedom

Question If determinism is true, can I still allow myself to feel "good" about reaching accomplishments through hard work and self-discipline? If I spend years learning karate, and eventually become a karate master, is it unethical to feel proud? As opposed to saying "that happened to me while I was alive."

Accepted:
December 9, 2009

Comments

Yes, you can and should feel good, feel proud, feel accomplished, regardless of whether or not determinism is true. You worked hard, you made hard choices, you did things rather than just let things happen to you. And all that is true even in a deterministic world. (For some discussion of what determinism means and entails, see my response to question 3004 here.)

Of course, I'm a compatibilist about free will and determinism, so I think determinism is irrelevant to these issues. However, some incompatibilists also think that even if determinism ruled out the sort of free will required for genuine moral desert, we could still legitimately feel proud of our accomplishments.

My view is that to think determinism rules out our ability to feel proud (or guilty) for what we do is to misunderstand what determinism means. It is to assume that determinism--the view, roughly, that everything that happens is complete caused by prior events--means that we are somehow bypassed by events that "happen to us" or that the causal forces in the universe work "around us" rather than "through us." If instead we recognize that determinism does not involve such bypassing, then it looks like the efforts we make, the decisions we make, the accomplishments we achieve, were possible only because of what we did, even if what we did was ultimately brought about by things that preceded our existence. I see no reason to think that determinism drains away the significance of what our selves do.