I. Assuming (for the moment) that we are capable of changing our minds on the free will question, let us examine what, if any, effect this would have on our daily lives. I will address the possibility of accepting hard determinism instead of soft determinism in this essay: I will not discuss the acceptance of indeterminism because it suffers such serious structural flaws in its thesis that human actions are uncaused that it is not really worth the effort. First I feel I must explicitly state, although it seems obvious, that soft determinism is the generally accepted position in this culture. We act as if we had the freedom to choose our thoughts and actions, and we continue to want to reward and punish ourselves and others in accordance with the latter belief. However, we also clearly do not hold ourselves responsible for acts which we did not intend or understand the consequences of, or which we felt forced to do. These are the arguments of ignorance and compulsion which are accepted by most of us to excuse us from moral accountability.
Having briefly spelled this out, I will examine what might happen if we were to somehow collectively decide (i.e. through a scientific breakthrough or mass religious conversion) that we have been mistaken and that hard determinism, not soft, was correct. If we believed that all of our behavior is not only caused (as soft determinists accept too), but also is not free - that is, we literally have no choice but to act as we do - then all our old notions of moral responsibility go right out the window. We would no longer be justified in becoming upset at a friend who betrayed us or in praising a child for sharing his toys with his brother. Reward and punishment would be equally irrelevant in both of these cases because the actors could not have acted in any other way than they actually did. Similarly, we could no longer castigate or think well of ourselves on the basis of our own misdeeds or a...