To discover that things are contingent is to discover that we can produce and prevent them.
Finally there appeared a professional teacher of rhetoric who, in middle life, stopped talking about persuasion and began to persuade in earnest, converting a whole civilization to his vision. Augustine’s early work against Skepticism, the Contra Academicos, contains a brief summary of Cicero’s account of Carneades’ theory of probability. Augustine makes a number of jokes at the expense of Carneades, but it is not completely clear what he thinks is wrong with the theory. Characteristically, he is worried most about the moral consequences; young men, he thinks, will use probability as an excuse to seduce other men’s wives. Despite Augustine’s dominant position in medieval thought, the Contra Academicos attracted little attention. Little of the thought of antiquity was available in the Dark Ages, but a rudimentary vocabulary of probability did survive.
It was this absence of thinking—which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think—that awakened my interest. Is evil-doing (the sins of omission, as well as the sins of commission) possible in default of not just “base motives” (as the law calls them) but of any motives whatever, of any particular prompting of interest or volition? Is wickedness, however we may define it, this being “determined to prove a villain,” not a necessary condition for evil-doing? Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?
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