I am a hard determinist. If you don’t know what that is, hard determinism is a position which states that all choices, thoughts, and actions are deterministic products of factors beyond our control: genetics, environment, brain chemistry, and the precise state of every particle in the universe leading up to each moment. Put more simply, I believe that everything in the universe is determined by a causal chain that started at the first cause; no one has any true agency regarding who they are or what they do, and nothing within us is actually determined by ourselves.
To begin with, I believe hard determinism is the only possible philosophical position to hold when it comes to free will. This is because, by definition, everything is either random or determined by something else. If something is random, then by definition, it occurs without cause or reason, so no control is possible; on the other hand, if something is determined, then it is caused by prior conditions, which means they are predetermined, and once again, no genuine control exists.
In fact, a reality where true free will exists, to me, is genuinely difficult to imagine; that world would have to have events that are neither random nor determined. Can you imagine a world where no one had any prior conditions to believing what they believe or doing what they do, and yet, their beliefs and actions are not random? Such a reality is logically inconceivable for the human mind.
Even the most ardent defender of free will must concede that there are laws which are ungovernable, like the earth’s magnetic force or gravity. It follows that these ungovernable facts can give rise to other facts which are by extension also ungovernable. If we accept that the universe began with such a set of ungovernable facts, then it follows that everything that followed afterwards (which is literally everything) is similarly ungovernable. In other words, all our actions stem not from an independent free will, but from a causal chain stretching back to the beginning of the universe; anything a person does was determined for them at the moment the universe began.
This brings us to the topic of moral responsibility. Under this line of thought, moral responsibility does not exist at all because no one has any real agency over what they do. Yes, I don’t believe in morality as a metaphysical concept, but it is still a useful biological and social tool to preserve cohesion in human society. Hard determinism entirely removes any justification for placing praise or blame upon a person for how they act, because what they do was determined for them by their genetics, upbringing, brain chemistry, circumstances, et cetera. Consider the following two people: Person A is a man who murders his wife in a fit of rage because he thought that the food she made him tasted unusual; Person B is a man who has a chip implanted in his brain which overtakes his motor control, causing him to kill his wife without having any say in the matter. Hard determinism states that both Person A and Person B had exactly the same amount of agency in what they did: zero, by which we can extrapolate that they also deserve the same amount of blame, which is also zero. Due to our biology and culture, the idea that these two people had the same agency is counterintuitive, but it is also necessarily true when one looks at it from a macro perspective rather than an individual one.
A position which attempts to combat this problem of agency is known as compatibilism, which states that both free will and a determined causal chain of events are mutually compatible and can both be true simultaneously. It does this by creating a distinction between internal determinants which stem from internal deliberation, desire, and morality, and external ones, such as coercion or physical compulsion. According to compatibilists, free will exists when an agent is free to act according to their own motivation without coercion or restraint. In the aforementioned scenario, Person A reached his actions through internal determination, whereas Person B was externally coerced into doing what he did, which for compatibilists would mean that Person A bears greater moral responsibility than Person B because he exercised more genuine agency.
Here is my problem with this line of thought: this distinction is entirely meaningless, because both internal determinants and external coercion are decided by factors beyond our control. Wikipedia actually articulates my problem with compatibilism excellently: the compatibilists are showing something to be compatible with determinism, but this something ought not to be called “free will.” Internal determinants themselves stem from countless external factors: genetics, upbringing, environment, circumstances, and so forth. Person A had precisely as much choice in the events leading up to his actions as Person B did; it is simply easier for us to empathize with Person B’s circumstances due to our own biology and upbringing. The disposition of Person A as someone who would murder his wife for a trivial reason was constructed entirely by factors beyond his control.
In the end, I do want to state that hard determinism is a deeply uncomfortable position for me to hold. I consider myself to be a fiercely independent person, so it is an idea which, in all honesty, feels almost blasphemous. Unfortunately, facts do not care about my feelings, and it would be deeply arrogant of me to think that the universe owes me comfort.