The Dilemma of Determinism

James begins with careful definitions. Determinism says the universe is a single complete block: everything that has ever happened or will happen is, in principle, determined from the state of the universe at any prior moment. Indeterminism says that some things are genuinely open — that the future contains real alternatives and that what actualises depends in part on events that are not necessitated.

The real argument against determinism is not logical but moral. If determinism is true, regret is irrational: what happened was the only thing that could have happened, so regretting it is regretting the nature of things. But regret is one of our most serious and instructive moral emotions — the sign that we recognise some outcomes as genuinely worse than alternatives. Determinism, if consistently held, requires us to abandon regret, and with it much of our moral life.

James defends the concept of chance not as chaos but as genuine openness. Chance means that some things are not controlled or necessitated in advance — not that they are random in a way that makes them worthless. Human freedom, on this view, is not an illusion to be explained away by neuroscience but a real feature of an indeterminist universe. The will to believe, the act of moral effort, the decision to make things better rather than accept them as they are — all of these require a world in which alternatives are real.

The Dilemma of Determinism was first read before the Harvard Divinity Students in 1884 and published in the Unitarian Review the same year. It remains one of the most readable philosophical defences of free will in the English language.