A man you love has relapsed — for the third time. You are sitting across from him at the table, and you find yourself feeling two things that do not fit together.
The first is anger. It says that he did this; that he chose it; that he could have called you, or left the room before the first drink; that there was another course open to him and he did not take it. The anger is certain of itself, and what it wants is for him to have chosen.
The second feeling sits directly beneath the first, and it is one you would probably never say aloud. It is the recognition that he was born with a brain he did not select, into a childhood he did not choose, with a craving he did not ask for — and that if you had been given his exact brain, his exact childhood, and his exact night, there is a fair chance you would be the one in his chair, and he would be the one across the table, angry at you.
So which is it? Did he choose — genuinely choose, in the way the anger needs him to have chosen, with a real alternative available and the freedom to take it or refuse it? Or did the whole episode follow from causes set in place long before tonight — before that room, before the first drink, perhaps before he was old enough to have any say in it?
Here is the difficulty. Sitting at that table, with the person directly in front of you, you cannot tell which of those is true.
Most of us have blamed people all our lives. We have been angry at them, and disappointed in them, and we have lain awake angry at ourselves. And not once, in all of it, have we actually known whether the thing all of that depends on is even true.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the first of eight episodes in a series called Choice and Blame. All eight converge on a single act — one of the most ordinary moral things we do, and perhaps one of the most severe. Blame: of other people, and of ourselves. We do it constantly and fluently, and nearly all of it rests on one quiet assumption — that the person could have done otherwise. That there was another road, that they took the wrong one, and that the wrong one was theirs. Over these eight episodes we are going to examine that assumption directly and test it as hard as it can be tested. We will ask whether anyone could ever, truly, have done otherwise — and we will find that the people who have spent their careers on the question cannot agree on the answer. And then, instead of supplying an answer, we will ask the question that does not depend on one: if you cannot settle whether anyone could have done otherwise, what becomes of blame?
That is where the series ends. Tonight we begin at the other end. Not with free will, not with physics, not with any theory at all. Tonight we simply look closely at something we already do — blame — and find the one assumption beneath it that we have never checked.
I should say that I am in this too, not above it. There is no expert's chair here, and I am not in one. I have spent longer than most with these arguments, and I will tell you where I come down when I have somewhere to come down — but I blame people too. I have my own version of the man at the table. Whatever turns out to be true of the ground under blame, I am standing on it as much as anyone.
So, one task tonight. We take the most automatic moral act we have — the one we would each swear we understood completely — and we look at what it actually rests on.
Start with something much smaller than the man at the table.
Someone cuts you off in traffic — a fast, careless move — and you brake hard, and your child is thrown forward against the seatbelt. In the half-second before you have thought anything at all, you are angry at the driver. Not frightened: angry. The difference matters, and it will matter later. If a branch had fallen across the road and you had braked in exactly the same way, you would have been shaken, but you would not have been angry at the branch. We do not resent a branch. We resent a driver. And the resentment contains an implicit accusation: you did not have to do that; you could have waited two seconds; you chose not to.
A friend forgets your birthday. The shape is the same. You are hurt, and inside the hurt is a claim: you could have remembered; you remembered last year; you simply did not trouble to this time. If you learned afterwards that she had been in hospital that entire week, the hurt would not merely soften — it would disappear, because the accusation beneath it would have nothing left to rest on. "She could not have remembered" and "I am hurt that she did not" cannot both be held at once. The moment the first is true, the second has nowhere to stand.
Now turn it around, because this is the half we would rather not look at. We do this to ourselves, harder than we do it to anyone else. The remark you made to your mother eleven years ago that you would give a great deal to withdraw. The way you were with your children when they were small and you were tired and it spilled onto them. Most people have some version of the replay that keeps you awake: you lie there in the dark going back over what you did, and the whole of the shame reduces to one sentence — I could have done otherwise. I could have been kinder. I could have stopped. There was another way, I knew it, and I did not take it. Self-blame is simply blame aimed in the other direction. It assumes the same thing, and it needs the same thing to be true.
These cases share one thing — the driver, the friend, the man at the table, the remark to your mother. Set the emotion aside and beneath each one is the same factual claim. Not a feeling: a claim about how things stood. The claim is that it could have gone another way; that the other way was open to the person; and that they are the one who closed it. Could have done otherwise. That is what blame depends on, every time.
And this is not a technical addition — not a piece of philosophy laid on top of an ordinary feeling. The could-have is part of the feeling itself. It is what makes anger anger rather than mere fear, and hurt hurt rather than mere disappointment. Remove the could-have and the feeling does not shrink; it becomes a different feeling altogether. We do not blame a branch. We do not blame a tumour. We do not blame a small child the way we blame an adult — and we know why, even if we have never put it into words: the small child could not have done otherwise, and the adult, we assume, could.
So blame depends entirely on that single claim. Every resentment, every grudge, every sleepless night depends on it. It is the most important assumption in our moral lives.
Which raises a plain question. Have we ever actually checked whether the claim is true?
Here is why we have never checked: we think we already have.
It does not feel like an assumption. It feels like something available to direct inspection, from the inside, at any moment. Try it now: raise your hand, or do not. You felt it — the sense of an open alternative, the impression that it was genuinely up to you and that you could have done the other thing. That impression is present throughout a human life; it is a constant feature of being conscious. And it seems to settle the question immediately. Of course I could have done otherwise — I can feel that I could have. What more could be wanted?
But the assumption has never really been examined, because the examination seemed already done — done automatically, many times a day, every time we felt ourselves choosing. And that feeling delivers less than it appears to. It delivers a strong impression that the alternative was open. It does not establish that it was. Those are not the same, and the gap between them is something we will spend real time on. The feeling that you could have done otherwise, and the fact of whether you could have, are two different things — and we have been treating them as one all our lives.
Some listeners will already be pulling the other way. Some of you have read a little, or thought about this a little, and you hold the opposite conviction: that there is no genuine "could have" at all; that it is all atoms and upbringing and neurons firing before "you" have decided anything; that free will is a consoling story; that the man at the table never had a chance, that you never had one either, and that blame is a relic of a pre-scientific age. If that is your position, here is something uncomfortable: you are in the same posture as the person who has never questioned any of it. You also take the matter to be settled. You have simply settled it the other way. You too are running your entire practice of blame — or your decision to give blame up — off a verdict you treat as obvious.
That is what the two camps have in common, the believer and the sceptic. Both take the metaphysics to be settled, and both take it that settling the metaphysics settles everything about blame. Get the deep fact right — free or not free — and you will know what to do with your anger at the man at the table. The believer says: it is true, so blame is in order. The sceptic says: it is false, so set the blame aside. Different answers; the same underlying assumption. Both hold that the whole question of blame waits on one fact about the universe, and that once you have the fact, the rest follows.
I will tell you now where the series is going, because I do not want to hold out a promise I cannot keep. This is one of the hardest questions there is, and we are going to work through it in full. We will take that one fact — could anyone, ever, really have done otherwise? — and build the three most serious living answers to it one at a time, each raised to the strongest form its ablest defender can give it. And here is the part I will not soften: at the end of that, none of them wins. Three serious answers, each still defended by serious philosophers, and none of the three defeats the other two. I am not going to be able to hand you the answer. I cannot settle it, and, as it turns out, neither can they. The disagreement is real, and it is fundamental.
If that sounds like a disappointment — then why do it? — the truth is the reverse, and seeing why is the point. The fact that we cannot settle whether the assumption holds does not make the question of blame go away. It makes it more pressing. And to see why, we have to do one more thing tonight: notice that we have been asking one question all along, when we have in fact been carrying two.
Here are the two questions we have been carrying as one. Take it slowly; once the distinction is clear, everything that follows runs through it.
The first question is whether it is true. Could the man at the table really have done otherwise? Could anyone, ever, given exactly the brain they had and exactly the moment they were in, actually have taken the other course? That is a question about how the world is arranged — about causes, about physics, about whether the future is open or already fixed. It is a deep question about the universe, and it is the one we have just admitted no one can settle.
The second question is quite different. It is: what is your blame for? What is the anger at the man at the table actually doing — to him, sitting there, and to you, when you turn it on yourself? What does it accomplish? What would make it fair? Is it there to protect the people he keeps harming? To compel a change? Is it retribution — to make him suffer in return for the suffering he caused? Or is it simply running because that is what anger does? That is not a question about atoms. It is a question about something human beings do to one another and to themselves — a practice. And it has its own answer, or its own several answers, none of which mentions a single neuron.
Here is what we tend to do with these two, and what the believer and the sceptic were both doing a moment ago. We treat the second question as though it were merely the consequence of the first — as though it had no shape of its own. Settle whether he is free, the thought goes, and you will automatically know what your blame is for. If he is free, blame is fair; that ends it. If he is not free, blame is a mistake; drop it; that ends it. The practical question is taken to follow from the metaphysical one automatically.
Try to run that, and here is what happens. Suppose — for tonight, as an experiment — someone proved to you, genuinely proved it, that the man could not have done otherwise; that the relapse was fixed in him before the evening began. Does the problem dissolve? Look at it. You still have to decide whether he sleeps in the house tonight. You still have to decide whether the children are safe. You still have to decide whether you can go on loving him without being destroyed by it, and whether what you feel towards him even counts as blame any longer, or has become something else. None of that was removed when the metaphysics was answered. The deep question received its answer — no, he could not have — and every practical question you actually have to live with is still there in front of you, entirely undecided.
And it runs the same way in reverse. Suppose someone proved that he could have done otherwise, beyond dispute. Does that tell you what to do? It tells you your anger is not a plain mistake. It does not tell you whether the anger helps — whether it is what brings him back or what drives him to the next drink; whether holding it for eleven years is justice or simply prolongs your own pain. Even with the deep question settled, either way, the practical one is untouched.
So they were never one question. We fused them, and the fusion was an error, and recognising it as an error is the most important thing to take from tonight. Here is how to hold it. You can set the deep question aside entirely. You can say: I do not know, and perhaps no one can know, whether anyone could ever truly have done otherwise — and you can leave that unanswered for the rest of your life — and you will still have the whole of the second question to work on. What is my blame for? What is it doing? Would I keep it if I could not show it was deserved? That question does not wait on the metaphysics. It never was waiting on the metaphysics. It only appeared to be, because we had treated the two as one.
So try this, with a real case — not the man at the table; he is mine, find your own. Bring to mind someone you are angry at right now: someone who let you down this week, and you are still carrying it. Or, if you have the nerve, the harder one — the thing you did that you cannot forgive yourself for. Hold it in front of you. Find the could-have inside it: the they should have, or the I should have, which underneath is always a they could have, an I could have. It is there, and everything depends on it.
Now separate the two. Ask the first question: is that could-have actually true? Could they really have done otherwise, given everything they were and everything bearing on them in that moment? It is hard to answer. You do not know. Honestly, you do not.
And now, separately, ask the second: never mind whether it is true — what is my blame for here? What is it doing, to them and to me? What would I even want it to accomplish? Would I keep it if I were told, for certain, that they could not have done otherwise?
Those are two different questions. And the second did not become any easier, or any harder, when you got stuck on the first. That is the distinction you will work with from here on. Tonight we have only located it; over the next seven episodes we draw it out.
Where does the episode leave us? You now hold two questions where you thought you had one: is it true — could anyone ever really have done otherwise — and what is my blame for? You had treated those as a single thing all your life, the second seeming merely to follow from the first. Tonight you have separated them. And you have seen what will drive the next seven episodes: the deep question, is it true, may be one no one can answer — and your blame does not get to wait for the answer. The practical question is yours whether or not the metaphysics is ever resolved. You cannot dispose of it by saying "well, who can really know." It does not disappear when you cannot know. It remains, and it is yours, every time you are angry at someone you love.
This is the lightest step of a hard climb, and it asks the least of the question. All we have done tonight is find the question and see what it rests on. From next time, we begin to test it — and I do not intend to make it easy, because it is not.
Next time we take up the view many of you arrived already holding: that there is no genuine "could have" at all; that every choice is the outcome of things you never authored — causes running back without end. It is the most powerful case against everything described tonight, and many serious people take it to settle the matter outright. We will state it as strongly as it can be put and then ask the harder question it opens: even if every choice you make is caused, does caused actually mean not up to you?
For tonight, only this. The next time it comes up — the anger at the driver, the disappointment in the friend, the voice at night telling you what you should have done — stop at the should have and hear the could have inside it. Then notice that you do not know whether it is true. You never have. And you are about to learn that the ablest people who ever considered the question cannot settle it either — and that you will have to decide what to do with your blame regardless.
That is the problem. We have only just opened it.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.