A horrible fate was prophesied first to Laius and then to his son, Oedipus: he would kill his own father and marry his own mother Jocasta. All the efforts (at times cruel and even inhuman) of the characters involved ended up in failure. The Fate was obviously right and Oedipus, somehow unintentionally, stained himself with the terrible deeds he eventually perpetrated. One of the reasons why Greek tragedy is so dramatically effective lies in the idea of ineluctability that imbues all the charactersā lives; it scares us because we basically feel ourselves free. We tend to believe that most of our actions, if not all of them, are the consequence of our choices, which in their turn determine our story. The decision to go to university by train or by car is my decision, which has someāyet minimalāconsequences.
Moreover, not only our self-perception of human beings but the whole universe of social bonds, ethical norms and political institutions depends on the presuppositionāmore or less explicit and more or less vagueāthat human beings are free and therefore responsible for their actions. We deserve praise or, on the contrary, blame for what we have freely chosen. It is not by chance that, in many judicial systems, punishability depends on the concept of responsibility, that is, of freedom of the accused. If we want to be slightly more technical, we can express such self-perception by claiming that we perceive our future as partially open; that is, we think that we have in front of us multiple possible actions among which we can freely choose the one we want to take. It is also clear that we cannot entirely determine our future: many events do not depend on us. And yet, we deeply believe that many future aspects are neither unavoidable nor impossible. They have been traditionally called future contingents.1
Our intuition of being free is deeply rooted; consequently, we are inclined to abandon other beliefs that contrast with this feeling. However, the history of thinking is full of representations, firstly mythical and poetical then theoretical, that deny the actual manās free will. In fact, the tragic heroes of the Greek tragedy feel free and masters of their actions, and they ignore that they are just pawns at Fateās mercy. The tragedy affects us so much because of this discrepancy between our illusion of free will and the actual absence of it. Not by chance, according to the Stoic ethicsāone of the first elaborations on ethics that explicitly takes into account the absence of free will in human beingsāhappiness lies precisely in getting rid of such cognitive distortion: the wise man knows that he is not free, therefore he tunes his desires with what will inevitably happen.
The theoretical stance according to which men are not free (in any informative acceptations of the term) is usually called fatalism. It denies that future contingents exist, thus maintaining that there is one inevitable future. This view may be accepted or argued for in various ways: by appeal to logical, metaphysical or theological laws. This book is dedicated to the logic-metaphysical analysis of the problem of theological fatalism. In short, theological fatalism claims that, since God predicts today what we will do tomorrow and since Godās knowledge is infallible, tomorrow we will do nothing but what God has predicted that we would do, and therefore we are not free to choose between two or more alternatives. In other words, theological fatalism āis the thesis that infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree. If there is a being who knows the entire future infallibly, then no human act is freeā.2
In this introductive chapter, we shall deal with logical fatalism, which is at the basis of the most ancient philosophical analysis of the problem, included in the well-known chapter nine of Aristotleās De Interpretatione. Logical fatalism does not draw our impossibility to do otherwise from an omniscient God who predicts everything, but from some logico-semantical principles, quite intuitive at a first glance. We start from logic fatalism because it shows interesting intersections with theological fatalism. The plan of this chapter is as follows. In the next section, a few comments are devoted to the relationship between fatalism and a cognate notion: determinism. Then, in Sect. 1.2, we will present a version of the argument for logical fatalism, singling out, in Sect. 1.3, the main critical points and hinting at a few general strategies for solving them. Finally, in Sect. 1.4, we will make a theoretical switch from logical to theological fatalism, thus arriving at the threshold of the main topic of our investigation.
1.1 Fatalism and Determinism
Fatalism can be defined, prima facie, as the philosophical position, or better, the intuition, according to which future is fixed and inevitable; therefore free actions by agents do not exist. We can obviously toy with a certain idea of freedom, but actually we are not masters of our own destiny.
The idea that the history of the world is fixed and that each event is nothing but the necessary product of a determined cause-effect relation is at the basis of a concept similar to fatalism: determinism.
Pierre Simone de Laplace gives a well-known definition of determinism:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. (De Laplace 1902, p. 4)
In a precise moment (we can call it t 0), the state of the universe is entirely determined by the laws of nature and by the state of universe in the preceding moment. Consequently, if we perfectly knew all the information about the state of the universe and the dynamics of the system, we could infallibly foresee the state of the universe in ten seconds as well as in thirty million years. In other words, the dynamic of evolution of the universe is described by a function: once the arguments are provided, the value is univocally determined. One can wonder whether the same holds also toward the past. Laplaceāas we have seen in the quotationādid think so. In order for the projection to work toward both the future and the past, a two-way function is necessary. Otherwise, it would be admissible a state of the world at t 0 as the product of the laws of development and of the state at t ā1, as well as the product of the laws of development and the alternative state at t ā2. From the origin of modern science up to the so-called Quantum Revolution, determinism has beenāmore or less explicitlyāat the basis of the scientific view of the world. However, it is a purely metaphysical hypothesis which concerns the general structure of the dynamic of reality.
Bernstein (2002, pp. 67ā69) maintains that fatalism and determinism are two independent, though intertwined, theses. In a nutshell, determinism presumes a series of causal and nomic assumptions. Indeed, we can affirm that we consider the world deterministic because of the existence of laws, which are in their turn deterministic, that is, founded on a deterministic interpretation of the cause-effect relation. In a world without any causal regularity, it would be difficult to bring up determinism. However, according to Bernstein, even a universe made by a sequence of nomically non-related events can be fatalist, that is, each future event becomes inevitable.
For reasons that will be clear shortly, we prefer to speak of ānecessitismā instead of āfatalismā. The two notions distinguished by Bernstein can be defined as follows:
- Necessitism
- A universe is necessitist if the course of events is given and does not admit alternatives or ramifications; the future, as well as the past, are written. Such a stance has to do with the topology and ontology of time (see Chap. 2).3
- Determinism
- In a determinist world, the present state of the world and its laws of evolution determine univocally all the states of the world following the present one.
While necessitism does not imply determinism, the opposite is the case: a determinist world is also a necessitist one. Determinism provides an explicative account of why future facts are inevitable: they are inevitable because they are the effects of a determinist dynamic. For this reason, when we refer in this book to the models in which the future is closed and inevitable, we will mainly mean determinist models and not simply necessitist models, given that the necessity of the events within necessitism remains unsupported if determinism is not accepted.
Where, then, is fatalismās place? In our opinion, fatalism is a particular way to conceive necessitism, that is, it is necessitism with respect to the choices of free agents. In other words, in a world without free agents, it is quite meaningless to talk about fatalism (rather, we should speak about neces...