Hard Determinism Vs Free Will. What is it? What're the repercussions if it's true?

What if I were to tell you that everything that has ever happened to you in your lifetime was already determined by prior events. In which I'm speaking of is a philosophical concept that we know as determinism. To put a definition on determinism I would say it to be a relationship of cause and effect between events being determined by the consequent prior causes; for humans, however, this can be a terrifying thought and rightfully so if we don’t have free will do our decisions even matter? All this and more when we're discussing the relationship of Determinism vs Free Will.

What does it even mean to be free? Or to have free will? Having free will or being free ultimately means that we have the ability to make our decisions freely and it is we who are responsible for the decisions we make. This meaning that our actions have no accordance when thinking of fate.

If you were to think we had free will and were attempting to prove it by saying I'm going to stop reading this blog post right now or by saying screw that I'm going to continue just to prove a point. You can go back and look at the causes that made you end up with the decision to either stop reading or continue and as I hope you have decided to continue just know it wasn’t your decision to do so.

Getting to hard determinism, however, means that every decision we make in life is controlled by outside external factors and this meaning that we have no free will. This view of hard determinism has some not so fun implications though. The implications I'm speaking of are that if hard determinism is true then that means there is no free will thus, we have no ethical accountability. Morality requires free will and since determinism shuts down the idea of free will this messes with our view on morality. Meaning that without free will and us being subjected to the causality of the universe that we, in fact, can't be responsible for our actions. Now in the court of law, I do not suggest trying to use this as your defense because we should still attempt to be good people even if we are subjected to the grasp of the universe. But now I leave it to you. Do we have free will? Is hard determinism the answer? I think it is, but I'll leave that for you to decide!