ABSTRACT
This chapter contains the views of many scholars and philosophers about which you do not need to know for the OCR examination, but which will add to your understanding of this subject.
Most people agree that people are morally responsible only for the actions they carry out freely and deliberately – actions that are freely chosen. Determinism, however, states that there are laws of nature which govern everything that happens and that all our actions are the result of these scientific laws, and that every choice we make was determined by the situation immediately before it, and that that situation was determined by the situation before it, and so on, as far back as you want to go. Freedom of choice is just an illusion and so personal responsibility is a meaningless concept, as are blame and punishment. This makes it difficult to make any sense of the idea that people are to be held morally and legally responsible only for actions carried out freely and deliberately. However, we do feel a sense of responsibility for what we have done even if we did not choose that action; for example, a driver who kills a child who ran out in front of his car would blame himself for the death, even if it was not his fault and he could not have prevented it.
