Another difficulty in Taylor's argument for fatalism

Abstract

Several attempts to criticize Taylor's argument in support of fatalism have followed its appearance in the first edition of his Metaphysics. 1 But the dust of battle has now settled, and the general consensus is that Taylor's argument suffers from a misplaced modal operator. I wish to show that, whether that is indeed the case or not, Taylor's argument fails on yet another count. Taylor's strategy consists in transposing, mutatis mutandis, the reasons we have for being fatalists about the past on to our relationships to future events. This should enable us to see why we should also assent to fatalism about the future. Of course, this strategy does not embody the argument itself; it is merely a didactic device intended to achieve several goals, one of which is to make it perfectly clear that temporal considerations have no role to play in the demonstration. The gist of the argument is that the relations obtaining between events at t and events at t + dt are such that if the first are the sufficient condition of the second, there result constraints upon the first which make it impossible for them to have been any different. And if the first were human actions, then they could not have been any different either. It is this very strategy which reveals the difficulty in Taylor's argument, for the argument regarding fatalism about the past fails to capture the essential reason why we view the past as irrevocable. Hence, it should suffice for us to find the corresponding flaw in the argument concerning fatalism about the future to see why we should not accept its conclusion either.