​Chapter 8

The first horn yields a form where an explanation was wanted, and the determinist can afford to lose it. The second wins his case on its own. Suppose the cause of the settling is never found: then the settling was chance, and chance is not freedom. A man is no more the author of an act than of a coin's landing, and freedom bought at the price of randomness is worthless.

The fork looks exhaustive because causation has been fused with necessitation. A cause is taken to guarantee its effect — given the cause, the effect could not have failed to follow — and the concept of causing does not entail that. To call an event caused is to say that it derives from something else: this came out of that, and the relation holds without the cause fixing a unique outcome. This is Anscombe's point. Either determined or random is exhaustive only if causing means necessitating, since whatever is not necessitated then falls outside causation and has nowhere left to go but chance.

The space this opens is not where freedom hides. A weaker causal relation between prior states and the outcome still leaves the settling derived from what preceded it, inferred with a looser grip, and the question of who settled it has not been touched. What the opening does establish is that the second horn was manufactured. Everything not necessitated was swept onto it by definition, and the sweeping is the only reason it looks like a category.

So the horn has to be examined for what it holds. The determinist needs a sense of chance meeting two conditions: it must apply to a settling that no prior state fixed, and it must entail that the settling is nobody's. Three meanings are in circulation and they are not the same.

Ignorance of conditions is first. A tossed coin is unpredictable because nobody tracks the force of the flick, the rate of spin, the air, the surface it lands on. All of those operate, and together they may fix the outcome completely. The randomness is in the observer, and a sufficiently instrumented laboratory can remove it. Call an event chance in this sense and nothing has been said about its production, only about what is known of it — which fails the first condition, since the event was determined throughout.

Causation from outside the deliberation is another. John has a headache. He is irritable, the pain shortens his patience, and he takes the money because the headache changed how long he was willing to keep considering; it never entered as a consideration. A cause operated, bearing no relation to the content of the grounds under review. Aristotle treats this kind of case as the crossing of causal lines: a man goes to the market on business and meets a debtor there, and the meeting is called chance, though each line running into it is causal throughout. It is called chance because neither line explains the intersection in terms of what the lines were about. This also fails the first condition. The settling was caused; the cause came from outside the matter at hand.

Only the third sense reaches a genuinely underived settling: the event had no cause at all. Whether it belongs to nobody is precisely what has to be shown, and the word arrives with the answer fitted. That such a settling does not belong to John, that no control was exercised, that any other outcome was equally available — each is a further claim, and each rides in on the first two senses, where a coin's result does simply fall out and nobody does author it. The determinist wins by using one word for three things.

The third sense also has to be located before it can be used, and physical randomness shows up where a cause exists — in a distribution across enormous numbers of cases. A stable distribution is what an untracked deterministic process yields as well. The coin has a flat profile, and the coin was the first sense — outcomes fixed by the flick and the spin and the air, unpredictable if nobody follows them. A profile certifies that results fall in a steady proportion. It says nothing about whether any single result was fixed in advance. Absolute uncausedness leaves no signature measurement could pick up, since a signature would be a pattern, and patterns are what the causal side is made of.

Take the word as the physicist uses it and the horn gives way. A process called random has been placed under a pattern: a distribution holding across cases, confirmed by measurement, of a kind with a law. Objective chance is a positive probabilistic structure. Offered as the alternative to a cause, it is a cause with the scale of its regularity moved from the single transition to the profile, and the fork reads "determined or determined."

Take the word strictly, as an uncaused singular event, and the horn gives way from the other side. Something became determinate that the prior state did not fix. It ended the matter, and afterward the question is answered and stays resolved. And it happened where a question stood open — which is the case as the determinist set it up, John at the table with the grounds laid out and none of them sufficient. Underived, resolving something open: the description grants everything the account has asked for, withholding the author.

Withholding him takes a reason. The reason on offer is that nothing in John's prior states made the outcome that outcome, and this was conceded before the fork was put; it cannot be spent a second time to show that the outcome is nobody's. A word does the work instead. Luck brings the coin and the decay along with it, and in both of those nothing was open.

The atom answers nothing. No question, no grounds laid out — an underived event with no one there, which is the whole content of "chance is nobody's deed." The phrase holds exactly where nothing was open, and the fork carries it to a table where something was. What the determinist offers is a choice between a cause and a cause, or a choice between a cause and an agent given a pejorative name. The complaint was that freedom adds no third option to the fork; but the fork has no second one.

One objection survives this. Rewind the world to the moment before the choice, with the past exactly as it was and the laws unchanged, and let it run again. Van Inwagen's replay: suppose John sometimes takes the money and sometimes walks away. Over many runs the outcomes form some distribution, and nothing in the antecedent state accounts for the distribution. What could the difference between the runs be, if not luck?

The demand inside the scenario is circular. It asks for an explanation of why this outcome rather than the alternative, drawn from what was the case before the choice, and any answer meeting it would cite something prior that settled the matter — determinism, granted before the question is asked. An undetermined act cannot supply a contrastive ground in the prior state, and its failure to do so is what makes it the kind of act it is. What the replay does expose is the missing positive account: if the antecedents do not distinguish the runs, then authorship must, and authorship has not been shown.

Mele puts the same worry without the circle. His luck objection does not define control as determination. It asks how the exercise of control gets attached to the agent when nothing about him settled which way things would go. Control is normally traced through the agent: what he wanted and what he was disposed to do explains why the outcome occurred, and the tracing is what makes it his. Remove the securing and the tracing breaks. The outcome is not attributable to anything in John, since nothing in John made it that outcome, and an unattributable outcome looks like something that happened rather than something done. No clarification of terms dissolves this.

Freedom and pure chance coincide in what neither is derived from. Their difference lies elsewhere. The question is no longer whether the settling was caused or random, since both describe its relation to what preceded it. Whatever attaches the outcome to John cannot be a prior state of his, on pain of returning to the chain, and what remains to be shown is what makes the settling his deed.