Optimism and pessimism
Remember that time you avoided hitting a pedestrian who darted in front of your car? Remember that other time you ran a pedestrian over? Now assume determinism and the relevant physics. It follows that both incidents turned out as well for you and the pedestrian as they could have ‒ and also as badly as they could have. That’s because each incident turned out the only way it could have for you and the pedestrian. (I ignore the literally negligible chance that either incident turns out differently for the people involved.)
According to determinism and the relevant physics, events always turn out as well as they could for those involved. This consequence seems to support optimism. Yet events also always turn out as badly as they could for those involved, which seems to support pessimism. How, you might ask, can any correct worldview support both optimism and its contrary?
The answer requires distinguishing (a) “Events always turn out as well as they could for those involved” from (b) “Events usually turn out well for those involved.” Clearly the determinist’s (a) doesn’t imply the optimist’s (b). Likewise, the fact that events always turn out as badly as they could for those involved doesn’t imply that they usually turn out badly for those involved. So determinism, by itself, supports neither optimism nor pessimism.
If a restaurant is awful enough, then the best meal you can get there won’t usually be good. If a restaurant is great enough, then the worst meal you can get there won’t usually be bad. The optimist says that our existence is more like the great restaurant than the awful one; the pessimist says the reverse. Which, if either, of them is right is a large issue that I’ll touch on in future posts.
