The network of necessitation
You’re driving when suddenly a pedestrian darts out in front of your car. You slam on the brakes and thereby avoid hitting him. But not because you would have hit him if you hadn’t braked. For if you hadn’t braked, the chance is essentially zero that you or he would have existed in the first place. Instead, your braking avoided a collision because of the inductive truth that cars in such circumstances keep moving unless the brakes are used. As I’ve said before, we often use false counterfactuals to express inductive truths.
Perhaps my explanation seems wrong to you. Perhaps you’re convinced that you would have hit the pedestrian if you hadn’t braked. If so, I suspect it’s because you want to stop the rewriting of history at a convenient point in the recent past. You simply stipulate one change ‒ failing to brake ‒ and think you can leave everything else as it was. You ignore the fact that the same long-ago conditions that necessitated your existence and the pedestrian’s existence also necessitated your braking. You mistakenly suppose that you could change the last of those consequences without changing the other two.
If so, you’re not alone. Some people seem to want to exempt their actions from an all-encompassing network of necessitation. But that desire is misguided. If our actions lie outside such a network, then our actions ultimately reduce to magic, which makes them unintelligible. I see nothing desirable about that.
