Monroe Beardsley’s analysis of historical inevitability is simply an analysis of determinism. Thus, he has not specified what, in excess of determinism, is implied by assertions of historical inevitability

Danto, Arthur C.

English

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Philosophic Exchange
Volume 2
Number 1 Volume 1, Number 2, Summer 1971 Article 2
1971
Determinism and Inevitability
Arthur C. Danto
Columbia University
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ARTIIUR C .  DANTO 
Professor of Phi losophy 
ColUJ'!�ia Univer�ity 
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Danto: Determinism and Inevitability
Published by Digital Commons @Brockport, 1971
DETERMI N ISM AND INEVITAB I LITY* 
by 
Arthur C. Danto 
To claim of an event e that it was inevitable is at least to claim that it was 
determined. And to claim that c determined e but did not make e inevitable is to 
imply, if e was inevitable, that something x talces up the slack between deter· 
mination and inevitabiHty. So "e was inevitable" is equal to "e was determined" + 
x, and the conceptual task is to solve for x. I construe Beardsley's thesis to be that 
x .,,1: 0. I criticize him only foT failing to note that his analysis of inevitability is 
simply an analysis of determinism, and so for not having specified what in excess of 
determinism is entailed by the claim that e was inevitable. T concede that there are 
inevitable events and that there being such is of some importance for the concept 
of history. 
I 
An event is ine' itable if. in addition to having been determined, it could not have 
been avoided (avoidability is in the etymology of inevitability). Hence to claim the 
occurrence of inevitable events is to allow the possibility of determined but 
avoidable events. So the concepts of determination and avoidability are not 
mutually exclushe. 
Consider a man who falls from a plane and is killed upon impact with the earth's 
surface. The physics of falling bodies, the relative inelasticity of the surface, and 
the frailty of human bodies make death in such a case inevitable if nothing under 
the conditions could have been done to abort or modulate impact with the earth. 
What reference to inevitability adds to the determinism of death is only tbe 
unintervenability into the process by preventative human actions: no condition c 
which. had it been varied, would have meant not-e. 1t is the inaccessibility of these 
to human action which makes a determined event an inevitable one. A logical 
condition for being killed upon impact is that one achieve impact while alive. Had 
the man died of heart-attack en tombant, that would have prevented his death upon 
(byJ impact. So the man could prevent e by contriving his death in mid-fall, which is 
circumstantially ruled out if he has no weapon, no poison , or insufficient time to 
employ them. and no knowledge of how to induce voluntary massive coronary. Had 
(more cheerily) a great bird inrersected the path of fall and borne the faller off to 
Samarkand, e would not have happened. If we could contrive to intersect the path 
of fall with a helicopter (or a nabakovian £litter!). much the same result of 
preventing e is expected, but this is circumstantially excluded if we lack, or are 
un:ible to mobiHze a vehicle of reprieve. So it is circumstances. we might say, which 
rend�r inevitable events which are otherwise determined to happen. Thus if a set of 
conditions (c) determines e,  then whatever circumstances of ignorance or im· 
potency insulate us from varying a member of (c) assures that e wiU be inevitable. 
And it is not {c) but these insulating circumstances which define our helplessness 
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DETERMINISM AND INEVITABILITY 
regarding e. Like watching with horror a man fall out of the sky. knowing that 
nothing that would prevent his deach were it to happen can be done by us. Just the 
same things which make us helpless make his <leach inevitable. 
I I  
A n  event e '  which i s  similar in every relevant respect to e may take place and be 
determined by conditions (c') which are similaT in every relevant respect to those 
conditions (c) which determine e, and yet e be inevitable and e' not. Consider two 
cases of diabetus mel/etus. of comparable severity. The bodies here are unable to 
regulate blood-sugar level and to store glycogen in the tissues. In compensation, the 
rate of fat metabolism is increased. Unoxidized ketones are formed which are 
eliminated, along with the fixed base they hold, through the urine. This removes 
alkili from the body, which increases the level of blood acidity. This is acidosis 
which, if untreated, leads to coma and then death. Death by uncontrolled diabetus 
was inevitable until the invention o( insulin therapy by Baning and Best in 1923, 
since short of severe dietary measures, themselves of extreme metabolic con­
sequence. there was no way of preventing it. Since 1923 it has been easily con­
trolled and death by acidosis need never occur. Insulin happens to be made from 
animal pancreases. Suppose now that someone refuses insulin therapy because of 
religious scruples, e.g., the pancreatomized animals are forbidden, or sacred, or 
wha1ever. Refusal makes death inevitable in bis case, but strictly speaking, since 
insulin is in plentiful supply and the means of administering it simple ro use, his 
death could be avoided if he wanted it to be, and hence, as we have resolved to use 
the term, inevitability does not apply to the event. He could have prevented it had 
he wanted to. Whereas an event is inevitable if we could not prevent it even where 
we would. Our wanting or not wanting to prevent an event does not figure amongst 
the factors which define inevitability. The question is only whether we are able to 
prevent the event, not whether we choose to exercise the ability. When it is, so to 
speak. up lo us whether or not to intervene, then we can intervene, and though 
determined, the event is no longer inevitable. 
Increase in our knowledge of causal laws brings an i1�crease in our ability to 
intervene if we choose to, and would correspondingly decrease inevitability were it 
not for those chance factors. like the lack of a weapon in our first example, which 
circumstantially make an event inevitable which we know how to prevent. So it 
may be of some use to distinguish events made inevitable by ignorance from those 
made inevitable by impotencies. 
Now an event which renders us incapable of intervening when we know how to 
intervene and would intervene if we couid, may be said to make the event in 
question inevitable. It does not, however, determine that event; it is not amongst 
the conditions cited as determining conditions for the event. Suppose, thus, the 
falling man had a knife, and would have killed himseU in order not to die of the 
impact. But the knife slilps from his hand. Then this event might be said to have 
made his death by impact inevitable. Using this as our model, we may say that if the 
Tet o[fensive made withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam inevitable, that 
withdrawal was to begin with determined to occur. But the Tet offensive rendered 
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ARTHUR C. DANTO 
us incapable of intervening to prevent it from happening, though before it hap­
pened, the withdrawal was not inevitable. For we could have intervened, could 
have altered one of the determining conditions before the Tet offensive. But not 
afterwards. Afterwards it was - too late. That the withdrawal was inevitable 
presupposes that it was determined. But that it was determined in no sense entails 
that it could not have been prevented. So its having been determined does not 
entail that it was inevitable. 
III 
Suppose determinism is universally true. Then for each event e there is a set (c) 
of cond itions with reference to which the occurrence of e is fully explained. I shall 
further suppose what I dsewhere would be prepared to argue for and assert, that 
explanations entail general laws covering the explananda. So for each event e, fully 
explained with reference to (c.-), there is a Jaw Lee relating e to (c). With the concept 
of laws there are many problems, practical and conceptual. I want here only to 
stress that laws are in their nature fully general, which means that they do not entail 
the number of their instances, so it is consistent with e being covered by Lee, that e 
is the only event in history so covered . Even so, the .explanation of e will entail a 
general law. To be sure, we may wish to maintain that unless we have a large 
number of instances, we are nol certain we have the explanatory law. But it is no 
part of the meaning of 'law' that laws have a l arge number of covered instances, 
unless we (i) adopt the Principle of Many Instances as verificatory and (ii) embrace 
Verificationism. Barring (ii), we will distinguish evidential from conceptual 
quest ions regarding laws. And it is conceptually possible that e should be the 
unique instance of Lee. and the latter anyway be entailed by the explanation of e. 
Granting determinism; granting general laws as entailed by determinism; ac­
cepting that determinism does not a-s such entail that anything is inevitable, then, it 
seems plain to m e ,  it follows that inevitability must be explicated with reference to 
something other than the applicability of laws. And the chief defect in Beardsley's 
analysis is that it rests content with explicating inevitability just iin terms of "non­
accidcntal" laws. This is an infelecitous move, not, as Beardsley would suppose, 
because a critic might find the notion of such Jaws unacceptable, but because they 
fail to discriminate the inevitable from the merely determined. So, unless there are 
special sorts of laws appealed to in connection with inevitability, reference to laws 
alone will not give Beardsley his analysis. And though he does suggest, with his use 
(lf the expression "Inevitability Sentence," that there might be special laws, in fact 
his clarification shows 1hat all he means is non-accidentally. And I should claim 
that a Jaw is not explanatory if it is accidental. and hence non-accidental laws (if 
nhat expression is not redundant) are equally supposed in determinism. Indeed. if 
my argument has been correct, Beardsley is even wrong in supposing that the event 
which makes another one inevitable is related to it by law. For that would imply 
t hat it is amongst the determining conditions for that event. But the Tet offensive 
did not determine the withdrawal in making it inevitable. It rather incapacitated us 
in whatever way from in terfe'ling with the conditions which determined the event 
which it now was too late to prevent. 
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DETERMINISM AND INEVITABILITY 
IV 
ll is no part of Beardsley's claim {nor of mine) that all eve111ts are inevitable, and 
indeed, such a claim would be very much stronger and very much less acceptable 
than lhe claim lhat all events are determined. Universal inevitability would mean 
that something always occurs which incapacitates us from preventing events we 
would prevent if we could. We never can prevent anything we want to. according to 
such a theory. But then, unless something quite mysteriously fatalistic is intended. 
such a theory is almost surely false. It is always a matter of circumstancial in­
vestigation which reveals whether an event was inevitable or not: that e was 
inevicable and that i made it inevitable are purely empirical questions, indeed 
historical questions, in every instance. So the concept of inevitability is consistent 
with some events being avoidable (and even avoided), with our being able to 
prevent them when we want to. 
Bul the application of all of this to actions, apart from those actions which 
consist in actual prevention or attempts at actual prevention, remains to be 
analyzed . What. for example. does it mean to say that an action was inevitable. or 
lhat something made a cerrain action inevitable? U the troops are inevitably with­
drawn from Viecnam. this entails that someone withdraw them. And withdrawing 
troops is an action. So if the event was inevitable, the action was inevitable. And 
how is tlhis 10 work? 
Presumably, an action is inevicable when the agent in question has no alternative 
rational choice, not even a choice nor to choose. Any event which puts him in that 
kind of situation may be said to make his choice in that case inevitable. The Tet 
offensive was such an event if it left no rational alternative save to withdraw troops. 
We may suppose that the objective conditions which prevailed in the Vietnam 
conflict determined that we could not win. We might at various points in the 
developmen1 of the conflict have varied these conditions if we had bad adequate 
knowledge of what would happen if we did not. But we did not have that 
knowledge. and perhaps our misconceptions were amongst the determining 
conditions: lhe case is very complex. The Tet offensive, then, if it indeed made 
withdrawal inevitable, did so because it was too late, once it had happened, for us 
to alter any of the conditions which determined our withdrawal. Even then, of 
course. tlhere were alternatives. Only not rational alternatives, relative to our other 
atlitudes and beliefs. Indeed, these attitudes and beliefs must be counted amongst 
the condlilions which delermined that we should not win. Had we been prepared, 
for exam pie, 10 destroy lhe earth rather than lose, we could have prevented with­
drawal. The religious forebearer from insulin would, in his terms, have similarly 
had no rational alternative, if fluid from the pancreas of a taboo beast would assure 
his eternal damnation. We explain human actions in part with reference to the 
beliefs held by their agents. these beliefs rationally determining them to act in 
certain ways and not in others. And it was relative 10 our beliefs that the Tet of­
fensive made our action inevitable, supposing ascription of inevitability here to be 
correct. The question no longer was whether but when the troops would be with­
drawn. The Tet offensive closed a door upon a counterfactual historical route it 
was too late to follow: "Down the passage we did not take -Towards the dloor we 
never opened - lnto Lhe rose-garden . . .  " 
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ARTHUR C. DANTO 
v 
Professor Beardsley has enriched the philosophy of history by introducing che 
concept of ine,·itability. which participates in the perspectives of science and 
literature at once. History is filled with moments which divide an open future from 
a closed. after which there is nothing left but to live out what has been made 
inevitable as though it were our face. Sometimes, as in tragedy, the moment comes 
because of ignorance: had Oedipus known the man was his father. he would not 
have performed an action which made inevitable his fall and mutilation. I would 
hardly suppose that ine,�tability is always and logically co-implicated with 
ignorance in this way as it is wilh impotency and incapacity to alter things. But one 
remarkable fact about history is that it is able to give descriptions of past events 
which would not have been available to those who lived through those events, these 
descriptions being based upon events future to those of which the descriptions are 
given. and regarding which the actors could have no clear knowledge. That 
'>Omcthing made a later c,·ent inevitable is such a description. It marks an 
irreH:rsibility in human affairs. a point of non-returning. a fatality revealed in 
retrospect. an unrecoverable opportunity, a fatality revealed in retrospect, an 
unrecoverable opportunity, powerlessness and loss. 
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