Ted Honderich

Ted Honderich advocates strict causality and ‘hard determinism.’

Honderich rejects compatibilism on the grounds that our will is completely caused by prior events. He rejects all forms of incompatibilism that involve non-physical substances, dualist forms of agency, freedom as chance, or quantum mechanical indeterminism leading to the uncaused ‘origination’ of actions and decisions.

Honderich is ‘dismayed’ because the truth of determinism requires that we give up ‘origination’ or the ability to control our ‘life hopes.’ We could been the author of our own actions, we might have acted otherwise, (and thus be held accountable and morally responsible) but as he says:

We have a kind of life-hope which is incompatible with a belief in determinism. An open future, a future we can make for ourselves, is one of which determinism isn't true.

But we can take a ‘tough’ or intransigent attitude to our understanding that free will is incompatible with determinism and resist compromise with ideas like origination.

He argues as follows

• States of the brain are, in the first place, effects, the effects of other physical states.
• Many states of the brain, secondly, are correlates. A particular state accompanying a particular experience
• Some states of the brain, thirdly, are causes, both of other states of the brain and also of certain movements of one's body. The latter are actions. Some are relatively simple while others, are complex
• Simple or complex, however, all actions are movements, or of course stillnesses, caused by states of the brain.
•  It follows from the above  three premisses, about states of the brain as effects, as correlates and as causes, that on every occasion when we act, we can only act as in fact we do.
• It follows too that we are not responsible for our actions, and, what is most fundamental, that we do not possess selves of a certain character.

Adapted from Essays on Freedom of Action, ed. Ted Honderich, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, p.187

In spite of this actions and thoughts being determined it does not follow that we will have no moral feelings. Moral approval and disapproval are affected by lack of free will but we still live in moral societies and may act to establish or maintain our moral standing.