The Chain and the Falling Stone

There is in us, perhaps, a modest but stubborn habit: to tie a ribbon around the world and call the knot an explanation. We see a thing happen, we hear a cry in the night, we witness an act, and at once we judge and assign a cause to its effect, or several causes, neatly arranged, as though life were obliged to present itself in tidy parcels. This black-and-white confidence, this almost innocent readiness to say why, has its ancestry in old Humean observation [natural causality is universal]—in the persuasion that natural causality is everywhere and admits of no holiday. If a lion hunts and kills a zebra to eat, we say simply: it is because the lion was hungry, or it is in the nature of the lion to hunt and eat.

But what, then, made the lion hungry?

It is here, I think, that our curiosity ought properly to begin. For if every event in nature has a prior cause, then that prior cause, being itself an event, must also have something standing behind it, and behind that something yet another. One may follow the thread backwards until the mind grows tired of its own pursuit—back into that old image of turtles without end, where the earth rests upon the shell of one giant creature, and that creature upon another, and so on into the dimness. If the universality of natural causality is to be taken seriously, if universality is to mean what it says and not merely what is convenient, then human action too must belong to this endless chain. It cannot stand apart from the order to which all other things submit. In that case, a human deed is not a sovereign beginning, but only another link in the long procession of cause and effect, stretching infinitely beyond sight. And if that is so, by what means are we to conceive of moral responsibility?

In a world understood as deterministic, the old moral vocabulary begins to lose its firmness under the fingers. Responsibility, guilt, crime, sin, punishment, virtue, atonement, reward—these remain as words, certainly, but their necessity grows uncertain, as candles in daylight. For if all things unfold according to what was already set in motion, then such ideas seem less like eternal truths than like customs of speech we have inherited without examining.

How is one to praise or blame a falling stone? It falls according to its nature. How are we to reproach the ice for melting into its own water? It merely obeys the condition of its being. And if human actions are likewise deterministic—if everything is, as some would say, already written—and if men and women are only the instruments through which that writing passes into the visible world, then praise and shame seem equally misplaced. One might grieve, one might suffer, one might fear, but to condemn, in the deepest sense, becomes difficult. For what is there to condemn in a creature that could only ever unfold as it did?

 

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