I bet you’re a determinist!
In a scene from a popular Christmas movie, Clark Griswold coaxes his pajama-clad family outside on a freezing night to watch him fire up his extravagant light display. After much fanfare, he connects the lights to the household electrical supply ‒ and nothing happens. Flummoxed and embarrassed, he then checks (we’re given to believe) not only the extension cords and the electrical outlets but thousands of individual bulbs on the roof.
Why do all that checking? Because obviously something must have gone wrong beforehand, and Clark wants to find out what. His reasoning, in general terms, is this: (1) If everything goes right beforehand that needs to go right for an outcome to occur, then that outcome must occur. (2) The outcome didn’t occur. (3) Therefore, something must have gone wrong beforehand that needed to go right.
Focus on premise (1), and bear in mind that “everything…that needs to go right” includes the absence of anything preventing the outcome. I emphasized the word “must” in (1) because no one thinks that even if everything goes right beforehand, there’s still a chance his lights won’t work. Sure, we sometimes say “Shit happens,” but we think shit happened because some unknown thing went wrong that needed to go right.
So I bet you accept (1). Here’s how (1) commits you to determinism. When an outcome occurs, the prior conditions must include everything necessary for that outcome; otherwise the outcome wouldn’t have occurred. But (1) says that the presence of everything necessary for an outcome necessitates the outcome. Therefore, the prior conditions collectively necessitated the outcome (because a subset of them did). With “outcome” standing for outcomes in general, that’s determinism.
So you can reject determinism only if you can convince yourself that maybe nothing went wrong before Clark’s lights failed to work. Good luck with that.
