Last Tuesday in class we discussed determinism. The paper we read and discussed was from the hard determinist Holbach. My professor seemed to think that responsibility and hard determinism are incompatible. I don't feel that they are. I think it's completely possible that we enforce responsibility on ourselves, and that it might just be another cause and effect in our causal chain. What was proposed was that the concept of responsibility exists regardless of humans knowing it or implementing it. I find it hard to believe that the concept of responsibility existed before human beings came up with it. We can even differentiate between things that are and aren't responsible. For instance an asteroid can slam into a planet, wreaking havoc on it's surface several times that of the strongest nuclear explosion. In it's simplest form, this is simply matter and energy traveling through space, interacting with other matter and energy. Let's take a physically similar example of matter and energy traveling through space, let's suppose that the president authorizes the full deployment of our nuclear arsenal with the goal of wiping out humanity. If it was the asteroid, then nothing is responsible. If it was the president, he was responsible. It sounds like the even the meaning of the concept only applies to certain matter and energy interacting with other matter in the universe. Little balls of matter and energy we call human beings. Since it is so specific, and we can find no application of it outside of our view of the world and each other, isn't it safe to say that it is part of being a human, and that it and hard determinism can coexist?