PHYSICS This uniWed, successive, inescapable series of necessitating causes was called, by the Stoics and their critics, Fate (LS 55f) The doctrine of fate was immediately subjected to philosophical criticism from several quarters, and Cicero’s On Fate gives a lively account of arguments levelled against it and Stoic responses to those arguments One famous argument was called the Lazy Argument (argos logos); its purpose was to show that if determinism was true, there was no point in doing anything whatever The argument imagines someone addressing a Stoic patient on his sickbed ‘If it is fated that you will recover from this illness, then whether or not you call a doctor you will recover; likewise, if it is fated that you will not recover from this illness, then whether or not you call a doctor you will not recover One or the other is your fate: so there is no point in calling a doctor’ (Fat 29 LS 55s0) Obviously, an argument of the same kind can be applied to any of the normal actions of life: another source imagines it being used to persuade a boxer that there is no point in putting up his guard In response, Chrysippus made a distinction between simple and complex facts ‘Socrates will die on such and such a day’ may be true whatever Socrates does; but ‘Laius will beget Oedipus’ cannot be true unless Laius copulates with his wife If the patient’s recovery is a complex fact linked to calling a doctor, then calling the doctor will be no less fated than the eventual recovery If the history of the world is a single tissue of interconnected events, it is not clear how far Chrysippus is entitled to make his distinction between simple and complex facts: perhaps Socrates’ death is co-fated (to use Chrysippus’ term) with several of his actions, such as his behaviour when on trial Indeed, perhaps everything is co-fated with everything else Nonetheless, Chrysippus is entitled to reject the Lazy Argument Consider the propositions (1) If I call the doctor, I will recover (2) If I not call the doctor, I will recover If I am fated to recover, then the consequent of each of these propositions is true; and if we interpret each of the propositions truth-functionally, in the manner of Philo, each of them will on that supposition be true In that sense it will be true that whether or not I call the doctor I will recover But as these propositions are normally used in guiding behaviour, they must be 195