ȁȈȅ Partʺʺ: Politics and Philosophy
Ļe complete determinist is unimpressed, then, by the observation
that the criminal could contingently have avoided committing his crimes.
Far from proving his responsibility for them, that observation is an unin-
formative truism. It merely says thatifthe links in a causal chain had been
different from what they actually were and had been fated to be, then the
outcome of the chain would have been different from what it in fact was.
Despite these assertions of the (imaginary) fatalist, we all have per-
sonal experience with making decisionsourselves. We decide, true enough,
largely in the light of external circumstances. Often these include the
expected reactions of other people. But it is we ourselves who weigh the
considerations pulling one way and another. We know from our own expe-
rience with decisions, furthermore, and from what observation suggests
about the decisions of other people, that people do respond to prospects
of reward and punishment, approval and disapproval. (Surely economists
understand about incentives.) Holding people responsible does affect their
behavior.
A fatalist could accept this conclusion without abandoning his doctrine.
He could agree that if juries, judges, and legislatures generally accepted the
Clarence Darrow defense, crime would be more rampant than it is in fact,
and the world a more miserable place. Society is fortunate, he could agree,
that juries, judges, and legislatures, usually ignoring Clarence Darrow, as
they are fated to ignore him, do hold criminals responsible and do punish
them. We are fortunate, in other words, that his determinist theory is not
generally accepted and implemented. Yet the fatalist could maintain that
his theory is correct, that he is fated to propound it exactly as he does, and
that—probably fortunately—you and I and most of the rest of us are nev-
ertheless fated to reject it.
How would the theory of strict determinism interpret academic dis-
putes over that theory itself? Taken literally, it would regard each move
in the dispute—each conversation, lecture, journal article, criticism of an
article, reply to the criticism, and every slight detail in each of these—as
simply a particular link in the great causal chain. Ļe determinist philoso-
pher would agree that his latest paper on the topic was fated in every slight-
est detail to say what it does say, fated not only by what he had heard and
read on the topic but by his genes and childhood experiences and innu-
merable other circumstances. All reactions to his paper are similarly fated.
Yet this consideration does not necessarily lead him to abandon the whole
issue and turn to some other branch of philosophy or some other line of
work. He could stick to the issue, recognizing that he is fated to do so and