Paul Russell on Fate
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds. And me, Nigel Warburton. Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybites.com. Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy. We, Nigel and I, are free to choose who to invite onto Philosophy Bites. And we can give reasons, good reasons I hope, why we approach the people we do. These reasons shape our choices. But are we free to choose which reasons to give weight to?

Are we free to be the kinds of beings who take some reasons more seriously than others? After all, perhaps we've been shaped by a combination of nature and nurture to value clarity and rigour above obfuscation. Perhaps our apparent freedom to choose is, at one level, just an illusion. Paul Russell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He believes that fate and luck have their part to play in the kinds of people we become.

important aspects of our moral lives are always partly outside our control. An interesting topic, providing an excellent reason to interview him. Paul Russell, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Nice to be here. We're going to talk about fate. What is fate? Well, that's a large question, but let me draw a basic distinction. The intuition that we've got when we're worried about fate, I think, is that somehow whatever is going to happen in the future, from our practical point of view,

There's nothing we can do. Our deliberations aren't going to make any difference. We don't have any kind of causal traction or influence on the world. Our agency doesn't matter to the outcome. So the moon is going to keep on going around the Earth

and the Earth is going to keep going on around the Sun, nothing I decide or choose or deliberate about is going to change that. Following the American philosopher Daniel Dennett might call that contributory fatalism. It's the sense that we're in circumstances where our deliberations and our actions really don't make any difference to the world. And for that reason, our practical attitude is whatever's going to happen is fixed or inevitable from our point of view as practical agents. Now I can see how I can't have any influence over what happens to the Moon...

But I can influence which question I ask you next. You don't have what Dennett would call an attitude of local fatalism. His example is someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge and they're free-falling towards San Francisco Bay. And they start thinking to themselves, now, is this really a good idea?

Well, as Dennett points out, at that stage in the proceedings, it's too late for your deliberations and your agency really to change the outcome. The question is whether or not that understanding of fatalism is a complete understanding of all the things that might concern us, because it's really about our kind of forward-looking practical attitude in the world.

But there's another perspective on fatalistic concern that's got to do with what's influencing us rather than to what extent we can influence the world. So the worry about that is a kind of background worry that the world is somehow fatalistic.

fixing us, including our deliberations and our choices and our own actions, such that what we actually do as agents is one that's fixed by the world. And that's where the issue of fatalism and determinism seem to come together quite closely. So I'm standing on the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge, deliberating to be or not to be, and I decide to jump. Now that seems like my choice, but some people think that you can explain that choice in terms of things that have happened to me in the past.

Right, exactly. And that's the worry about determinism. And there's a fairly standard compatibilist line that there's no conflict between determinism and freedom. Fatalism is the thought that your choices and your deliberations and your actions won't make any difference. But that is not implied by determinism, which is that there may be, as it were, causal factors lying behind or that account for, explain, necessitate your actual choices and deliberations.

So the simple kind of classical compatibilist line is that it's wrong to confuse determinism, the thought that there might be causal stories to be told about why you are, have the character you have, why you want to be rather than not be or vice versa, hopefully not. That's determinism, but that's not fatalism because it's still, on this view, unbiased.

up to you whether or not you hit San Francisco Bay in that practical predicament because it will depend on your own choices and deliberations. What happens will depend on how you choose, even if how you choose depends on some kind of external causal factors. Let's just get straight about compatibilism here because it's going to sound slightly strange to some people that you could say that

The reason why I'm standing on there deliberating about whether to jump or not is to do with things that happened in my childhood, throughout my adolescence and so on. And yet I still have a choice which means that I can determine what happens myself because that seems to be a contradiction. You seem to be both saying that everything that I am was a result of things that happened to me and that at that very moment it's up to me whether I jump or not. Yeah.

Well, this is right. And I think there's a strong incompatibilist intuition just along the lines you're suggesting, which is it's a demand from one point of view that there be genuine open possibilities. If I'm really in control of my fate, my destiny, it must really be metaphysically open whether I jump or don't jump. It's

It's up to me in those very same conditions. So with the very same causal background, it really depends on me. If my choices are somehow being causally determined or fixed, then maybe it's not really up to me in the same way. Related to that, there's another strong incompatibilist intuition, not just the alternative possibilities, but the idea of sourcehood or ultimacy.

And that is when I make the choice, whatever my decision is, to be or not to be, or any other less dramatic decision, the source of that decision, that was famous libertarian, influential libertarian Robert Kane puts it, the buck stops with me. There's no kind of regress into causal factors external to me. Really, that is the crucial divide between compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions as to whether or not we need a weaker notion of choice and deliberation

One that's consistent with having a causal background and causal influences operating on the agent's character and deliberations, or whether or not we really need this stronger, more robust conception of freedom in terms of alternate possibilities and or ultimate origination or sourcehood. So where do you stand on that?

Well, my view is sort of a synthesis of the two positions in each head. So if I could take the example of the person who's standing on the bridge making the major existential decision about their future, that individual may have certain capacities. This is the compatibilist story in terms of their moral capacities. And they may have the moral capacities of rational self-control.

We are assuming this isn't a child who isn't able to understand reasons or deliberate properly. We're assuming that this isn't a crazy person or a person who's got serious brain damage or something of that sort. It's not an animal. It's somebody who we can see by their dispositions and their functional activities are able to recognize reasons, give reasons, respond to reasons. So in this sense, they're up and running with a deliberative capacity. The problem then is on the other side...

that that is consistent with the fact, and this is where the incompatibles will come back to say, that given they've got these dispositions, the actual way they're exercised in the particular circumstances will ultimately depend on considerations that they don't have control over. And as it were, there's a causal regress that leads beyond them, or even just as disturbing perhaps, there's just arbitrary randomness in the process. And either way, that raises certain kinds of problems that are disturbing from the point of view of fate and luck.

You just mentioned luck. That seems to be quite different from fate to me. Well, that's an interesting question itself, the relationship between fate and luck. And there's certainly some overlap. This notion of fate that I'm talking about, it's not a notion of my deliberations and actions make no causal contribution to the world, because per hypothesis, that's not true in this case.

It's the idea that my deliberations and actions might be, as it were, determined or shaped by factors I don't have control over. Intuition about luck, the way that American philosopher Thomas Nagel would put it, we expect that people shouldn't be morally evaluated for things they don't have control over. So the worry here is that the actual way you deliberate, even although you might be reasons responsive in the sense I've just described...

ultimately depend on factors and features that you have no control over. So you're subject to luck and you're being held accountable for things that you're just lucky or unlucky about, depending on what the causal background is that you have no control over.

So on that question of moral luck, to take a classic example, somebody drives home over the alcohol limit and they get home and nothing happens. We hold them perhaps culpable for driving over the alcohol limit. But if a child had stepped out in front of them and been killed, we would hold them heavily responsible for a death, despite the fact that there's no internal difference in the state of the person who is a driver. Right.

Right, exactly. And this is often called consequential luck. And it's a particular kind of moral luck. There's a kind of pool of moral intuitions that seem to take us in opposite directions. One intuition is that people really should only be held responsible for the things that reflect the quality of their own will, the motivations and intentions. So

You do something daft, like you get behind the wheel of a car drunk, and that's one thing, and then it's just a matter of luck or chance what happens. You may hit a rubbish can or a lamppost, but you may hit a child and kill someone. But the other intuition is that there's really a big difference. When you hit a child and kill a child as a result of your own irresponsible actions, you really have done something, even though it doesn't reflect any difference in your will.

So that all the way back to the Greeks, all the way back to, say, the case of Oedipus, where there's the lack of intention and understanding that I'm killing my father and marrying my mother, but he's mortified and takes responsibility for the recognition that this is what he's done, even though the will or the intention wasn't there. So this is something that has fascinated people all the way back.

But also in the Greek tradition there are the Stoics who felt that everything that mattered morally was within our control and that carried through in philosophy through Kantian ethics where again you have this sense that the only thing that matters is intentions, is the will. It's absolutely right, there's a drive associated with Kantian ethics to keep luck and chanciness of that sort right out of morality. In life in so many ways we're lucky or unlucky about our looks, about our abilities, about our health.

But surely in morality, that's a little nice area of purity where we are free of that and the evaluations will depend totally on us. This is where we come back to issues of ultimacy, sourcehood, genuine choice of more libertarian kind. But the problem with this, really if I can put it, two problems. One is to articulate what the real metaphysical foundations or basis of that is. And famously for Kant,

This got him into a bizarre world where he had to separate our, as it were, scientific naturalistic understanding of the world of phenomena, experience, which looks law-like and no scope for real freedom, and a world of numinal being behind appearances only accessible to us in our awareness of being rational beings subject to the moral law. But it's how you put those worlds together has always remained completely obscure. That's the metaphysical problem.

And closely related to that, that really drives us into a potential skeptical problem, which is that as it were, we're driven to the thought that we're not really in that kind of control of anything, not even our will. This is where my view would be, is that really it's a kind of illusion to think that you could keep morality immune from luck in that way. Luck isn't all the same kind of thing, is it? No, exactly. You were asking me earlier about consequential luck.

But there's a lot in our constitution, in our kind of character, our motivational set or disposition. And we might indeed, as mature adults, have capacities to reflect upon our character and amend our character and modify it, and we can do that in conversation and discussion with each other. But there's still, in this view, going to be a regress problem. Even the ways we change our character will have a story to be told about why we did it, why we're inclined to reflect on our character, etc.

So you get into a worry that eventually sourcehood origination slips away from you, ultimately, and you're not in final control of who you are, even with these fairly sophisticated capacities operating.

And one other form of moral luck that's worth mentioning here, there's not just consequential luck or luck in your constitution and character, but also in your circumstances, the kinds of choices you face. You might be lucky or unlucky in the kind of difficult moral dilemmas and challenges that we encounter. And sometimes you might be in terrible predicaments where you have very tough choices to make. But this is something you don't really control, but they will demand you to make a decision. You can't evade them or walk away from them.

And that is circumstantial luck. And the interesting thing there is even if you gave libertarians or strong free will defenders the kind of metaphysics that they want, they would still, I think, confront this kind of problem, circumstantial luck, that would be extremely problematic for them. So I don't think that luck is something you can evade even on the most generous and imaginative metaphysical assumptions.

That's really interesting because it makes us, the kind of people that we are is ultimately not up to us to a great degree. It's just a lot of chance events that happen to us. There is this pull in the other direction where we have almost a desire to be God, where we can just self-create and determine our lives and determine whether we are good people or not. And that's captured in many moral philosophers' outlook. Right.

The philosopher Spinoza, the Dutch-Jewish 17th century philosopher, has this beautiful passage. The aspiration that we have is to be a kingdom within a kingdom. It's the idea that somehow we're in nature, but we can intervene in nature without having nature imposing itself upon us. And it's that kind of aspiration, to be a kingdom within a kingdom, which looks like it is an illusion. And then the question is, when that illusion is exposed, where does it leave us? Really what we're talking about is...

human life, what it's like to be a human choosing to do things, what part reasons play and what part external factors play in who we are and how we behave. What sort of stance do you think we ought to take? Do you think we should be optimistic about humanity or should we be pessimistic?

Well, that's something I'm quite interested in. I think the categories of optimism and pessimism really apply. I completely agree about this in relation to the free will problem. It's what makes free will problems sort of links naturally, in my mind, with the problem of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. They relate to the human predicament and what we think of as the worth of the value of human life. And there really are people who feel that if there isn't a God, then life is miserable and depressing. Pascal.

If there isn't an immortal soul, life will be miserable and depressing. Pascal again. And there are people who think that if there isn't free will, then it will be depressing and dreary as well. Now, that usually is the view that it's depressing and dreary because there won't be genuine freedom and responsibility. Whereas my view is something of a more mixed view, if I can put it this way, or a more moderate view.

pessimistic view, which is that we really do have compatibilist capacities and abilities. That's to say, reasons responsiveness. We can say a lot that's consistent with the naturalistic metaphysics that would be consistent even with deterministic assumptions, such that we can draw kinds of distinctions that we want to make. But for the reasons we were just saying, that at the same time, we don't have ultimacy. And what we're really reflecting on here, I think, and this is where for me, the pessimism comes in,

is the confrontation with human finitude, which has the parallel with something like facing death in the case of the immortality of the soul.

And the reflection there is that what we confront is that as agents, there are things we can do in the world, and we are responsible, and we are free, but we're confronted with the fact that our freedom and our responsibility is exercised in confrontation with so many things we don't control. And it's that confrontation that is something that is a universal feature of the human predicament, which reflects our finitude. We are not gods that can simply create the world on whim.

Our agency is exercised in a world where we're subject to constraints and limitations. From any point of view, it's a kind of sobering reflection about the finitude of our own agency and the contingency of our own being. And I think that is a kind of existential theme. Paul Russell, thank you very much.

Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. There's now a Philosophy Bites book published by Oxford University Press. For more information, go to www.philosophybites.com. For more information about the Institute, go to www.philosophy.sas.ac.uk.