Abstract
In a recent paper, Brian Cutter objected to the consequence argument due to its dependence on the principle that miracle workers are metaphysically impossible. A miracle worker is someone who has the ability to act in a way such that the laws of nature would be violated. While there is something to the thought that agents like us do not have this ability, Cutter claims that there is no compelling reason to regard miracle workers as metaphysically impossible. However, the paper contends that miracle workers are indeed impossible according to well-known theories concerning the laws of nature. This result highlights the reliance of the consequence argument on a plausible premise, which is widely accepted by proponents of non-Humean views of laws. The paper also provides a way to explain away the intuition that miracle workers are possible, but this has the upshot that a recent, two-dimensional formulation of the consequence argument is unsound.
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Notes
As noted by an anonymous reviewer, Cutter’s assertion that NL is “clearly” contingent may be deemed overly assertive: the way that NL is “clearly” contingent seems to depend on NFL being clearly false; but it isn’t clearly false. Now, I think the reason why NL seems clearly contingent is that most philosophers think that L is contingent, and since N is a factive operator, if L is contingent, NL will be contingent as well.
By Lewis’s response I literally mean Lewis’s own reply to the consequence argument that presupposes his theory of counterfactuals. Some philosophers, such as Kadri Vivhvelin (2013), argue that the Lewisian response does not depend on Lewis’s theory of counterfactuals, since it only relies on a distinction between weak and strong abilities that may be accepted by a form of compatibilism that permits laws to be fixed. If this is correct, then the miracle workers problem might well turn out to be a problem similar to the Necessary Fixity of the Past. But because this view is far from being popular, my focus here will be on the Necessary Fixity of the Laws.
It is interesting to see though that NL follows from \(\Box L\) without assuming (\(\alpha \)), but only the Lewisian duality, where \(\Diamond {\hspace{-4pt}}\rightarrow \) stands for the might-counterfactual:
- (L):
-
\(\phi \Diamond {\hspace{-4pt}}\rightarrow \psi \dashv \vdash \mathord {\sim }(\phi \Box {\hspace{-4.1pt}}\rightarrow \mathord {\sim }\psi )\)
The following proof becomes available:
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
Here is a more detailed formulation of the argument:
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1.
\( Can(s,a) \& (Does(s,a) \Diamond {\hspace{-4pt}}\rightarrow \mathord {\sim }L)\), assumption.
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2.
\( Can(s,a) \supset \Diamond (Does(s,a) \& L)\), from (Background Assumption).
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3.
Can(s, a), from 1.
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4.
\( \Diamond (Does(s,a) \& L)\), from 2 and 3.
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5.
\( \Diamond (Does(s,a) \& L) \rightarrow (Does(s,a) \Box {\hspace{-4.1pt}}\rightarrow L)\), from (NP).
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6.
\(Does(s,a) \Box {\hspace{-4.1pt}}\rightarrow L\), from 5 and 6.
-
7.
\(Does(s,a) \Diamond {\hspace{-4pt}}\rightarrow \mathord {\sim }L\), from 1.
-
1.
I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.
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Acknowledgements
I extend my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers of Philosophia for providing invaluable feedback that significantly enhanced thequality of this paper. Huge thanks also go to Célia Teixeira and Marcos Klemz for their insightful comments on an early draft presentedat the LEME seminar in Rio. And of course, special thanks to Sergio Miranda, Fabio Lampert, Sagid Salles, and Iago Bozza for theirawesome discussions that really enriched the topics covered here.
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Merlussi, P. The Consequence Argument and the Possibility of the Laws of Nature Being Violated. Philosophia (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-024-00726-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-024-00726-4