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Tallis in Wonderland

Random Thoughts on Luck

Raymond Tallis finds he’s an improbably accidental being.

A few years ago, as I was setting out on holiday, I looked at the departure board and noticed a flight flagged up for Florence. This reminded me of something I had forgotten in the rush to tidy things up before my departure; namely, to refer a patient, whose first name was Florence, for a surgical opinion. I immediately phoned my place of work to ensure that Florence was seen by the relevant expert. Later that day, she had an emergency operation that saved her life.

I have often thought about this episode as an example of what philosophers, after Bernard Williams, call ‘moral luck’ (also the subject of a superb essay by Michael Philips in Philosophy Now Issue 32, ‘Moral Luck and Moral Theory’). Had the plane to Florence not been delayed, the coincidence between the name of the city and the name of the patient would not have prompted an action which, if omitted, would have left me with a heavy burden of guilt.

This was an example of moral good luck. The focus in discussions of moral luck, however, is usually on bad luck – typically revolving around cases where a small act of negligence has disastrous consequences.

Think of a bus driver with an unblemished record. One day a child runs in front of his bus and, on account of an icy patch on the road and a moment of distraction, he doesn’t stop in time to prevent himself knocking down the child. On the basis of his moment of distraction he is judged responsible for the child’s death. His moral bad luck translates a minor infringement – perhaps glancing at a text on his phone – into a life-defining moral transgression.

I find this example particularly poignant because it involves someone whose job – driving a bus – already puts him at risk of involuntarily causing catastrophe. In my years as a doctor, I was always aware of my capacity to harm patients either by mistakes of commission – recommending or giving the wrong treatment – or omission – missing a diagnosis and leaving a serious condition untreated. While there is a moral, indeed professional, obligation to maximise one’s competence by the scrupulous embrace of training and learning opportunities and concentrating on what one is doing, the possibility of moral bad luck cannot be entirely eliminated.

Cosmic Luck

If moral luck is particularly disturbing, it’s because actors may be judged by events that fall only incompletely within the scope of their agency, and so their responsibility. But the influence of luck extends, beyond actions that have consequences for which one may be held responsible (by oneself as well as others), to the hand which one has been dealt in life.

One of most striking dimensions of such luck is what we may call ‘historical luck’: in my case, having been born in mid-twentieth century UK. It is only relatively recently that most people have lived lives not dominated by poverty, hunger, pain, persecution, the crushing burdens of physical labour, the early death of parents, siblings, and children, and cultures that crush life-chances, rights, and well-being. I have been spared the necessity of theft to feed myself and my family. I have also passed my life in a liberal democracy. I have not therefore had to choose between silent subservience to corrupt and punitive authorities, and protestations that may cost not only my own happiness but that of those I love – such that expressing my opinions could destroy the life chances of my children.

The persistence, and recent return, of autocratic regimes, is a stark reminder of just how lucky we are in having that luck. As John Adams, America’s second President, said – in unwitting anticipation of the advent of America’s forty-seventh President: “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Historical luck or its absence is piled on to many other dimensions of luck, manifested for instance in the different ways in which our bodies and minds may (or may not) facilitate our path through life. I won’t dwell on this because it is almost impossible to do it justice. Instead, I shall look beyond the accidents within our lives, to the accident of life itself. Though I cannot imagine the world without Raymond Tallis, I acknowledge that I am the child of an endless succession of large-scale and small-scale improbabilities.

The foundational improbability was the emergence of Something from Nothing. As I have often remarked (and so it must be true), many scientific attempts to account for the origin of the universe seem no more persuasive to me than the creation stories offered by sacred texts. Consider, for example, the creative accounting of physicists who appeal to instability in the so-called ‘quantum vacuum’ – a bubbling brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence due to quantum laws, allowing Nothing to wobble into Something. This seems to be only the simulacrum of an explanation as to why or how the void got populated with stuff. Why do the laws of quantum mechanics exist in the first place, for example?

The inexplicable birth of the universe set the scene for the subsequent events leading up to a planet fine-tuned for life. Just how fine-tuned is contested, but, as I discussed a little while back (‘Does the Cosmos Have a Purpose?’, Philosophy Now Issue 162), the chances of the accidental emergence of a ‘biophilic’ – and ultimately, ‘Tallisophilic’ – planet are, according to one estimate, about 1 in 10¹³⁵. Slim, or what? But such a planet was the necessary condition for the 3.8-billion-year process of evolution that eventually delivered the species to which your columnist belongs. The relatively recent awakening of the human ‘who’ in the material ‘what’, then created the framework setting the stage for the inexpressibly complex set of accidents that resulted in the circumstances leading to the meeting between the parents of the individual whose words you are reading. However, the long chain of improbabilities resulting in Ray Tallis’s life did not, of course, end with his parents’ simply meeting and mating. Aldous Huxley reflected on a seminal link in this long chain in his Fifth Philosophers’ Song (1920):

A million million spermatozoa
All of them alive.
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne,
But the One was Me.

Thus the road to Me: the accidental product of accidental products, and a remote descendant, perhaps even a beneficiary, of the Big Bang. Doing justice to the succession of intrauterine and extrauterine contingencies following his conception connecting the foetus that was Tallis-in-the-making with the elderly gent writing this column, would take a lifetime; and so I shall spare you, gentle reader, an unending list of possible counterfactuals. Enough has been said to establish that this entity who is the bearer of a viewpoint according to which he locates himself at the centre of a universe up to 7 trillion light years in diameter, is unimaginably contingent. This notwithstanding, he has outlasted nearly 30,000 sunsets: the luck baked into his self-curating body has been sustained since 1946. The Tallis organism is a thermodynamic freak, an improbable instance of a persisting entity that had been swept into existence by the frantic dynamism of the unfolding universe.

The Luck of the Gods

There are, of course, many who would reject the portrait of the universe’s random journey from First Something to the climactic event of the emergence of moral agents who can be held responsible for their actions, such as The Man in the Red Hat. Theists might tell us that everything that happens, has happened, and will happen, including those happenings that are doings brought about by moral agents, is ultimately a product of a Divine Will. God, or perhaps a consortium of gods, exercise(s) providential control over the world and those who act in it.

Unfortunately, theism doesn’t eradicate the element of luck. Rather, it introduces another kind of luck – so-called ‘salvific luck’ (as discussed by Scott Davison in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 1999). The term refers to the posthumous operation of luck, after we have been broken by the chain of accidents that first brought us into being and our earthly lives have come to an end. According to many theists, we shall wake up in an afterlife discovering that we have survived the death of our physical body. That’s the good news. The less good news is that we shall then be judged by God, and, on the basis of that judgement, assigned either to the permanent bliss of salvation, or to eternal condemnation. Never having believed in God, or believing in the wrong God or gods, may not count in one’s favour in this judgement. But this state of belief is itself influenced by accident – as in my case, primarily the accident of being brought up by parents who didn’t have religious beliefs. Some theologians further argue that religious belief occurs only in those who are directed to have it by the grace of God – implying that there is a kind of divine ‘grace equalizer’ compensating those who have had the bad luck to have been brought up in the wrong epoch or culture. But such thoughts prompt reflections on the unfairness of the rules governing the transition from this world to the next. It seems that the tyranny of luck extends beyond the universe that gave birth to your columnist, after a fourteen-billion-year gestation, to the Eternity of Heaven or Hell that many believe supplements our time on earth.

Since he is an infidel, Tallis believes his earthly portion is all that he will have, and that this won’t last for ever. Indeed, the interval between his improbable birth and the death that cancels it is a mere flash of light between endless darknesses. Sooner or later, a block of frozen urine dropping from a Boeing 747 overflying his daily walk, or some less dramatic event, will undo the work of the accidents that brought him into being. Meanwhile, he hopes enough time will remain to him to meditate on the varieties of luck that propelled him into being and the life he’s still living. While a few people may feel that it’s time he moved on, he cannot get enough of himself. He is quite unfazed – or insufficiently fazed – by the contingency of his existence: at the luck of being at all that is a condition of his having good or bad luck. This meta-fact doesn’t dent the self-importance that platforms his busy daily life, carrying him from task to task, recreation to recreation, column to column.

I’ll end where I began: recording my gratitude to the city of Florence for saving my patient’s life and sparing my conscience. And, of course, for all the accidents behind my lucky, and, by historical standards, absurdly privileged, life.

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City is now out in conjunction with Philosophy Now.