Is Choice Determined by the Strongest Motive?

Abstract

A determinist is one who maintains that every event has a cause.¹ The meaning of this formula can be expanded in various ways, but most determinists have understood it to mean that for every event which occurs, there is some other condition or set of conditions which are sufficient for its occurrence and in the presence of which it and it alone must occur. Upon this metaphysical doctrine determinists have also based a corresponding epistemological thesis that every future occurrence is predictable in perfect detail, at least in principle, to one who knows these causal conditions and the relevant causal laws which are present in any given state of the universe. As a consequence of these causal doctrines, the determinist also finds himself committed to the views that nothing in the past or present could have been otherwise and that everything in the future is in principle predictable in absolute detail. For the determinist, there can be nothing really new under the sun!