Tuesday, November 22, 2011

What does "fatalism" mean?


Here is how fatalism is defined by three different philosophers. Notice that according to their definition(s), Calvinism is not fatalistic.

This is one of the most common confusions in free will debates. Fatalism is the view that whatever is going to happen, is going to happen, no matter what we do. Determinism alone does not imply such a consequence. What we decide and what we do would make a difference in how things turn out–often an enormous difference–even if determinism should be true.

Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford 2005), 19.

An event is naturalistically fated just in case it occurs in every physically possible world. If there are such fated events, then in one clear sense somethings are going to happen no matter what–vary the initial conditions as much as you like (within the bounds of physical possibility) and the fated event will nonetheless eventuate. Naturalistic fatalism in this sense neither entails nor is entailed by determinism [p18].


Oedipus was fated to kill his father and marry his mother. What do we mean when we say that?  Certainly it must have been true that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother. But at least on one understanding, the claim seems to involve more than that: it involves the thought that nothing that Oedipus could have done would have stopped him from killing his father and marrying his mother. Somehow, no matter what he chose to do, no matter what actions he performed, circumstances would conspire to guarantee those outcomes. Fatalism, understood this way, thus amounts to powerlessness to avoid a given outcome.
 
We can put the point in terms of a counterfactual: There are some outcomes such that whatever action Oedipus were to perform, they would come about.
 
This is a very specific fatalism: two specific outcomes are fated. There is no implication that Oedipus could not effectively choose to do other things: he was free to choose where he went, what he said, what immediate bodily actions he performed.

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