Dilemma of determinism

In philosophy the dilemma of determinism historically was posed as a moral quandary, the quandary posed by a belief that 'fate' determines everything, leaving no room for humans to make decisions about their conduct, and if that is so, no room for them to be held responsible for their conduct. A modern version of the quandary does not rely upon 'fate' as determining events, but rather the 'laws of nature' in some form or another and, as before, we have the moral quandary of assigning moral responsibility.

Sometimes the dilemma is cast in a somewhat different manner, suggesting that 'fate' or the 'laws of nature' are not the sole agency for change, but that as an alternative at least some events might simply be random. That does not settle the dilemma, as humans are not responsible for random events any more than those controlled by outside agency. It does complicate the dilemma somewhat by suggesting a dichotomy of explanation, 'fate' or 'randomness', that appears unnecessarily to introduce the added issue of an alternative to 'fate'. Possibly that addition was intended to account for the probabilistic nature of some laws of physics, but if so, it is a poorly phrased way of doing so. A better approach would be to say that the 'laws of physics' determine the statistical probabilities for the occurrence of events, which leaves the moral dilemma intact without postulating a silly false dichotomy.

The older formulation in terms of 'fate' predates the Stoics and their major apologist Chrysippus. In a critique of Chrysippus, Plutarch proposed that responsibility implied humans had a possible influence over events, and the 'possible' necessarily must be able to occur, and cannot be 'possible' if fate denies its occurrence. The conclusion is that if 'fate' exists, then at least it is not invincible. This division into the fated and the unfated persists to this day.

In an address titled The dilemma of determinism in 1884, William James suggested that "A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free‐will controversy". Nonetheless, James went on to argue, just as did Plutarch, that events fall into two groups: the causally determined and the rest.

In short, if forced to choose between determinism and morality, James would sacrifice the first.

Steven Pinker also has made a division: A similar division between the scientific or 'theoretical' explanation of objects and the arena of human decision is proposed by Bok:

Such explanations that separate moral responsibility and the intuitive experience of free will from the domain of the 'laws of nature' are not universally accepted. There are philosophers that attempt to leave human decision making within the realm of scientific explanation, but claim that moral responsibility does not actually require the ability to enforce our decisions, which remain determined by natural law. Still others deny that humans have any capacity to make decisions at all, and the impression that we can is simply illusory.