Determinism in Minority Report

          Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg, takes place in Washington D.C. in the year 2054 where crime has been virtually eradicated from society as a result of the city’s Precrime unit. Led by Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise), the unit, with the help of a complex system revolving around three humans with the power to see into the future, arrest murderers before they are able to commit their crimes. I think this film does a great job of exploring both parts of our theme for this week: free will and determinism. In addition, the film also touches on the concept of time and some topics from our discussion last week.

            In J.R. Lucas’ Determinism, he claims, “all our actions are causally determined by conditions outside of our control.” Basically, Lucas is saying that from our birth our life is already predetermined for us. The experiences we go through during our life are not a result of our actions, but rather just the course of predetermined events. Lucas takes this idea further saying, “all actions for which we can be held responsible are determined,” and, “nothing occurs for which there is no explanation.” Thus, we can take this to mean that everything is determined. Lucas goes on to explain that there are four types of determinism, or four explanations for how our life is predetermined: logical determinism, theological determinism, psychological determinism, and physical determinism. Logical determinism, the simplest of the four, maintains that the future is fixed and unalterable, just like the past. We can relate this to our discussions from last week, specifically to David Lewis’ example of Tim killing his Grandfather in The Paradoxes of Time Travel. The second type of determinism is Theological. This form maintains that God knows everything, including the future, and He determines the course of our life. Psychological determinism is more fact based than the other three types. It claims that certain psychological laws enable us to predict ones future actions based on his handling of past actions. Lastly, physical determinism claims, “All other features of the world are dependent on physical factors. This is similar to psychological determinism, however rather than focusing on man it focuses on the world as a whole. Basically, knowing what we know now about the physical description of the world, physical determinism allows us to use that knowledge to predict the physical description at any other given time in the future.

            A lot of these concepts are explored in the film. The best example from the movie is when Tom Cruise is explaining the concept of precrime to Danny Witwer (Colin Ferrell) an agent from the US Department of Justice. When Anderton rolls a ball, that will inevitably fall, across a surface, Witwer catches it. “Why’d you catch that?” “Because it was gonna fall.” “You’re certain?” “Yea” “But it didn’t fall, you caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn’t change the fact that it was going to happen.” Thus, it is predetermined that if a ball is rolled across a finite surface, it is predetermined that the ball will fall. We can say this is a result of physical determinism. Thus from our past knowledge of balls or other objects rolling across finite surfaces we know that if we were to roll a ball across a finite surface it will fall off once it reaches the end. This is the same concept on which the pregame unit operates. While the crimes for which the precrime unit arrests people have not in fact actually happen, the system if flawless because the crimes still would have happened. As with the ball example, the fact that they did not happen doesn’t mean they were not going to happen. This is also the reason why Anderton is unable to change his outcome when the system predicts that he will murder someone. Without giving away what happens in the movie, the conditions of the murder are different than Anderton perceives will happen but the murder is still pre determined. Thus, although he becomes aware of the fact that he will murder in the future, Anderton is still unable to prevent it from happening. With this we can apply logical determinism. Anderton killing someone is predetermined thus, like the past it can’t be altered. Lastly, I leave you with another quote from the movie. The director of the precrime unit, Lamar Burgess, in a conversation with Aderton says “My father once told me, ‘we don’t choose the things we believe in; they choose us.”