Is punching kids justified?

Response to Martin Cox's lecture

A man walks into a lecture hall with a cup of tea in his hands. This cup of tea has been made by his secretary, whom he’s worked with for dozens of years, and she’s never once done anything out of the ordinary to his morning tea. He drinks the tea and goes berserk. He punches 5 innocent kids and promptly passes out. It is later found that his secretary had knowingly spiked his tea with a drug that magically makes you punch 5 innocent kids and pass out. Is the man at fault for the harm he caused? Most would say no. Then is it the secretary’s fault? If you believe it is, then you’ve fallen for Mr. Cox’s trap.

Every single person on earth came from someone else. They are made up of their mother's and father’s genes. The reason why you prefer chocolate ice cream over vanilla is essentially your parents’ fault. Even the reason why you were scrolling Instagram reels instead of writing your college essays is that the genes passed from your parents’ gametes coded for a lazy bum, and that lazy bum was given a phone, which led to the disaster you are. This means nothing you do is a product of your own free will. And this goes back infinitely because your parents are a combination of their parents, etc. Now, somebody like Ollie may argue that free will does indeed exist because he can completely change up every aspect of his life tomorrow. He’s once again fallen for Mr. Cox’s trap. It can easily be argued that Ollie’s parents’ genes coded him into being quite a stubborn person who has no choice but to change every aspect of his life in order to prove his point.

Now, it may seem hopeless. Maybe Martin Cox is just a 6’3 mastermind, and the entire point of his lecture was to ruin the world by justifying punching random kids through his arguments for determinism. However, there’s some light at the end of the tunnel. Not all hope is lost.

Whenever you make an argument, it is (usually) because you believe that the thing you are arguing for is the truth. Therefore, when Martin Cox stood in front of us to give that lecture on determinism, he genuinely believed that, compared to other schools of thought like libertarianism (free will exists) or compatibilism (free will and determinism can be somewhat compatible), determinism was the most rational framework. However, this contradicts determinism itself by suggesting he has the ability to choose between options. From a strictly determinist viewpoint, he would have had to arrive at determinism solely because of his genetic makeup, and no logic could have influenced that decision. This suggests that the arguments he makes are just an illusion of reason that feeds our innate agreement with determinism, and that we can never really know if they are true or not.

The concept of determinism is a very mind-bendingly logical argument. It so clearly argues for so many things, but ultimately has a hidden problem. Of course, the contradiction I raised is not a complete argument either, as it questions the process of coming to a conclusion rather than the conclusion itself, but it still stands as a strong argument against the school of thought.

Now, for the sake of increasing the word count of this article, let’s dive into a fun thought experiment. What would happen if it turned out that determinism is indeed the way of the universe? We no longer have a moral justification for locking up murderers or praising hard workers. Both the man who punched the children and the secretary who spiked his tea would be morally justified. After all, they had no choice but to act the way they did. Or perhaps we would continue to cling to our already seemingly arbitrary moral values? Who knows.

*Another interesting argument for determinism is Laplace’s Demon. If a super-intelligent demon (or maybe even ChatGPT in a couple of years) knew the exact location of every single atom in the universe and its momentum, then theoretically, they would be able to use the laws of physics to predict the entire future and past. Right? (Metaphysics somewhat says otherwise)*