Life, Chance & Life Chances Author(s): Lorraine Daston Source: Daedalus, Vol. 137, No. 1, On Life (Winter, 2008), pp. 5-14 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20028160 Accessed: 15-04-2019 09:14 UTC
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This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Lorraine Daston
Life, chance & life chances
Like all men in Babylon, I have been pro ly situated and no one is able to design consul ; like all, I have been a slave. I have principles to favor his particular condi known omnipotence, ignominy, impris tion, the principles of justice are the re onment .... I owe that almost monstrous sult of a fair agreement or bargain. variety to an institution - the Lottery - which is unknown in other nations, or at - John Rawls, A Theory of Justice work in them imperfectly or secretly. JLhese two social fantasies, the Borgesi -Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Baby lon" an lottery and the Rawlsian veil of igno rance, seem to be poles apart: the one seeks to maximize the role of chance in The principles of justice are chosen be hind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that social arrangements, the other to mini no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in mize it. The people of Babylon are sub the choice of principles by the outcome ject to the most dizzying reversals of of natural chance or the contingency of fortune ; the only regularity in their lives social circumstances. Since all are similar is the ordained drawing of lots that will once again reshuffle their fates, for bet ter or worse. "If the Lottery is an inten
Lorraine Daston, a Fellow of the American sification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, then is it not Academy since 1993, is director at the Max appropriate that chance intervene in ev Planck Institute for the History of Science in ery aspect of the drawing, not just one ? "x Berlin. Her many publications include uClassi cal Probability and the Enlightenment" (1988), No society could contrast more starkly "Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150 - 1750 " with Borgest Babylon than Rawls's poli ty of fairness, in which differences in cit (with Katharine Park, 1998), "Things that Talk: izens' "initial chances in life" are brand Object Lessons from Art and Science" (2004), ed as "especially deep inequalities," and "Objectivity" (with Peter Galison, 2007). which justice must alleviate.2 She has also coedited "Biographies of Scientific Objects" (2000), "The Moral Authority of Na i Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Babylon," ture" (2003), and "Thinking with Animals : New Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism" (2005). York : Penguin, 1998), 104.
? 2008 by the American Academy of Arts 2 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, & Sciences Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1971), 7.
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This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Yet like all polar opposites, Borges's reincarnation, or divine providence. The lottery and Rawls's veil of ignorance are life of Oedipus was foretold, as was that plotted along the same conceptual axis. of Jesus. Lesser lives, though not digni Both envision life in terms of chances - fied by oracles or prophecies, were also and moreover, chances that are symmet thought to unfurl according to some rically distributed. The Borgesian Baby global plan. These lives are hardly fair - lon may be nightmarishly chaotic, but why should Oedipus, much less all of the lottery that rules it is fair. Everyone Thebes, be punished for crimes he com has been proconsul; everyone has been mitted unwittingly? - but they are just, a slave. Fairness - not prosperity, not according to an ideal of justice that is happiness, not achievement - is also the cosmic rather than individual. No doubt fundamental intuition that undergirds fairness is as ancient and universal a hu Rawls's imagined social contract. Our man value as justice, but the notion that society may be poor or rich, barbaric or they coincide is historically and cultural highly cultivated, light-hearted or mel ly rare, and perhaps distinctively mod ancholy, but whatever its resources and ern. aspirations, we are all in it together. Ide This is not to say that the role of ally, you and I should have the same chance in human affairs has not been prospects, the same number of tickets in recognized and thematized in many cul the lottery, the same life chances. If not tures besides our own. The wheel of for everyone becomes proconsul, not every tune is a very old motif, carved into the one a slave, it is only because Rawls has stonework of medieval cathedrals and qualified his distribution of life chances flamboyantly rendered in Renaissance as "initial" rather than lifelong. At least paintings. With each spin of the wheel, at the beginning of life, every infant in kings and beggars trade places. In some a Rawlsian society should have an equal traditions, including ancient Judaism chance of becoming (to update the pos and early medieval Christianity, chance sibilities) president or street person. It mechanisms like the cast of dice or the is, of course, Rawls's hope and claim drawing of lots were used for divination ; that precisely this symmetry of possibili in others, such as Hinduism, the gods ties - not benevolence or charity - will themselves gamble. motivate all members of society to ame But chance per se is never normative liorate the condition of the worst off: in these examples. Fortuna is a power this could happen to you, or to your chil ful goddess, but it is Justitia who com dren. mands the moral high ground. Philoso There is nothing self-evident about phy consoled the much-tried Roman conceiving of life as a kind of many scholar and statesman Boethius by re sided fair die, rolled at every birth or at vealing that true wisdom lay in spiritual intervals almost as regular as the draw indifference to the caprices of fortune ings of the Babylonian lottery (e.g., the (in his case, imprisonment and impend neighborhood one happens to grow up ing execution on a trumped-up charge in, the schools one attends, the well- or of treason) : in Boethius's allegory, Dame ill-starred marriage, the healthy or ail Philosophy bests Fortuna, wheel and all. ing children). On the contrary, most so The use of dice, lots, and other aleatory cieties have imagined lives as ordered devices to plumb God's will when a con from birth (or perhaps even before), sequential decision loomed (see, for ex whether by inexorable fate, the cycle of ample, Numbers 33:54 or Proverbs 16133)
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This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms was frowned upon by theologians at Like all statistical regularities, life least since Augustine, precisely because chances apply in the first instance to such expedients forced God to rush in in populations, not individuals. The para order to contravene chance : a "tempta digmatic way of assessing life chances is tion of God." And the gambling Hindu the table of mortality, which plots many gods routinely cheated, the stakes being deaths as a function of some other vari too high to leave the game's outcome to able : age, sex, profession, lifestyle, or chance. In all cases, chance is invoked any number of other factors thought to only to be overcome - by philosophical influence longevity. The table of mortal transcendence, divine intervention, or ity serves as the basis for estimating the plain old stacking the deck. Life is full of most fundamental of all life chances - contingencies, fortune and misfortune. life expectancy. Thanks to the World But life itself is not, should not be, con Health Organization, we are accustomed ceived as a chance, a life chance in a co to reading about life expectancy as a lossal lottery. As the narrator of Borges's function of nationality - for example, short story about the Babylonian lottery 73.0 years for a newborn in Sweden ver observes : "I have known that thing the sus 25.9 years for one in Sierra Leone. Greeks knew not - uncertainty."3 But nationality is only one of many pos How did the metaphor of life chances sible groupings into which life chances come to be so irresistible, at least for may be parsed. Epidemiologists may modern societies like our own? And prefer grids that divide the world up in what does the symmetric distribution to city and country dwellers or the thin of such chances have to do with justice ? and the fat; sociologists draw the lines The first question is historical, the sec according to income level, sex, race, or ond philosophical. But they illuminate level of parental education. Further one another, or so I shall argue. The in more, life chances pertain not only to tuition that justice depends on equaliz quantity but also to quality of life : enjoy ing individual life chances depends cru ment of civil liberties, safety from vio cially on the conceptualization of life lence, access to the beauties of nature in terms of chances - rather than as and art. However defined and assessed, destinies, fates, providences, grace, or life chances apply to categories of people. works. Life chances are not synonymous The conceptual preconditions for with chaos : a lottery has a well-defined thinking in terms of life chances are structure specified by explicit rules. But therefore twofold : the notion of statis life chances fall short of a plan, whether tical regularities, and the belief in the laid out for the individual or the cosmos. existence of homogeneous categories To think of one's life in terms of life of people to which the regularities apply. chances is to admit, however reluctantly, Neither is intuitive. Long after statistics ineluctable contingency. A fistful of lot began to be systematically collected in tery tickets cannot guarantee the prize the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with certainty; sometimes a single ticket first concerning births and deaths and suffices to win the jackpot. Life chances eventually concerning everything from presume a world of statistical regulari crime rates to volume of trade, their reg ties, orderly but not determined. ularity continued to be a source of as tonishment to mathematicians, social thinkers, and the lay public alike. How 3 Borges, "The Lottery in Babylon," 101. amazing that almost the same number
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This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Lorraine of Englishmen committed suicide annu category-cementing homogeneities was al0" ally, year in, year out ; ditto for the num often a matter of political will, as in the life ber of letters that landed each year in the case of the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Parisian dead letter office.4 How could Section 2, dictated that a national cen such eventualities, each so entangled in sus be taken every decade in order to de a myriad of particular circumstances, termine the number of representatives become so predictable when regarded each state may elect to the lower house en masse? Whereas we tend nowadays of Congress, thereby calling into being a to be struck by the gap between the sta homogeneous class of those with a right tistical regularity that applies to a group to political representation (if not to suf and the actual fate of a particular mem frage, as in the case of free but disenfran ber ofthat group (e.g., the chain smoker chised women). In stipulating the frac who lives to a ripe old age free of lung tion (three-fifths) for which each slave cancer or heart disease or any of the oth would count in the census, the same ar er ailments strongly correlated with tar ticle also proclaimed the limits of homo and nicotine), nineteenth-century writ geneity. It is no accident that the gather ers on statistics pondered the apparent ing of state statistics on a large scale co contradictions between individual free incides historically with the French and will and the iron determinism of statis American Revolutions and the concert tical laws.' How could the suicide of, ed nation building of the first half of the say, Goethe's young Werther really be nineteenth century, both of which re his own decision, if the suicide rates re defined the categories of putative homo mained constant for decades on end? geneity and heterogeneity. Nevertheless, That is, their attention was arrested by the rubrics under which various nation the regularities, then so novel and sur al governments collect statistics remain prising, whereas ours is snagged by the quite diverse, sometimes to the point of exceptions, now so contrary to our ex incommensurability (a major headache pectations. for European Union or United Nations The belief in the homogeneity of pop statisticians charged with devising a col ulations was, if anything, still more lective scheme for all member states).5 hard-won. In order for a national census Even categories of 'natural' homo to make sense, it is the nation - not, for geneity may be devilishly difficult to dis example, the three Old Regime orders cern, as epidemiologists well know: does of clergy, aristocracy, and commoners - it make more difference to life expectan that must be accepted as the primary cy, for example, if one (a) is female, (b) unit of social classification. There is no is a vegetarian, or (c) lives next to a large point in counting the members of a sta oil refinery? The crisscrossing influ tistical reference class unless one is first ences of natural and political categories convinced that they in fact possess (who has no choice but to live next to enough commonalities to constitute a the oil refinery?) can be mind-boggling class, as opposed to a miscellany. The ly complex. Moreover, the political con word 'constitute' is used here advisedly: stitution of categories, as in the Ameri the decision to create (or destroy) such
5 Alain Desrosi?res, The Politics of Large Num 4 Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical bers : A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans. Thinking, 1830 -1900 (Princeton, N.J. : Prince Camille Naish (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard ton University Press, 1986), 151 -170. University Press, 1998), 236 - 278.
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This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms can case, can have long-lived conse calculation of life chances convenient- Life, chance quences for every aspect of life chances, ly ignored by most fantasy computer chances including the so-called natural ones of games of the "Dungeons and Dragons" morbidity and mortality. Race continues sort). to be a relevant category in American It is worth pausing a moment to mea medical journals, just as caste might be sure the moral magnitude of this rela in India, despite recent attempts to de tively recent conceptual change, the ad constitute these categories.6 If political vent of life chances. When an individu ly constituted categories are woven into al or family is repeatedly beset by major the fabric of daily life -jobs, neighbor misfortunes, most, perhaps all, cultures hoods, diet, schools, medical care, pol consider this a matter requiring expla lution levels, even laws - they can trans nation and justification : Why must Job mute social homogeneities into bodily suffer? Where is the justice in his ter ones. Whether categories are defined by rible trials? More pointedly, what has race, class, caste, religion, ethnic group, he in particular done to deserve such or sex, they are fraught with conse torments? In a culture accustomed to quences for health as well as happiness. thinking in terms of life chances, it is a Once the ideas of statistical regulari violation of probabilities that prompts ties and homogeneous reference classes these questions. A woman whose hus to which they apply are firmly in place, band had died at age thirty-five from a it is possible to conceive of biographies rare form of leukemia describes her re in terms of life chances and society as a action when her eight-year-old daugh vast lottery, even if it functions 'imper ter was diagnosed with the same fatal fectly or secretly.' Depending on the cir disease as a "reverse lottery moment" : cumstances in which one happens to be "When the doctors told me - using that born - in times of peace or war, feast or phrase, 'millions to one against,' along famine, as boy or girl, prince or pauper - with others such as, 'No other reported one's life chances will rise or fall. This cases in the world,' and, sadly, gently, way of thinking has become habitual ; 'The outlook isn't good' -1 started we know at a glance from the statistics screaming as if drowning out the words how the life chances of infants with the would stop them from being real."7 same birthday will differ, depending on Conversely, the more probable the af whether they are born in the Congo or fliction, according to the calculus of life in Taiwan, on a farm or in a metropolis, chances, the less pondering about its to literate or illiterate parents. We can meaning, although the suffering is in no also play the game retrospectively: his way diminished. Members of a culture tory teachers know that the quickest schooled in thinking about life chances way to cure students of a Miniver-Chee certainly retain notions of just desserts - veyesque romanticism about times of why do bad things happen to good peo yore is to show how overwhelmingly ple, and vice versa? - but the intensity more probable it was that any given per with which the question is posed is now son taken at random in medieval Europe modulated by degrees of probability. would have been a drudging peasant This acquired habit of thinking in rather than a gallant knight or damsel (a terms of differential life chances does
6 Ian Hacking, "Why Race Still Matters," D - 7 Lindsay Nicholson, "It Could Be You," The dalus 134 (1) (Winter 2005) : 102 -116. Guardian, May 27, 2006.
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This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms not in itself, however, imply an associat "Droits de l'homme et du citoyen' propagat ed sense of injustice concerning their ed by the French Revolution in 1789) to distribution : it requires a further step intrinsic human dignity (as invoked by in reasoning and feeling not just to reg the United Nations Declaration of Hu ister that life chances differ, but also to man Rights of 1948). They are probably wax indignant over that fact. It is not shifting once again, in the context of de difficult to imagine and indeed to instan bates over the rights of animals, forests, tiate societies that take differential life and perhaps the entire planet. chances for granted or that offer a ra However motley the metaphysics of tionale for them. An individual may be personhood, the direction of its evolu rewarded or punished for deeds in a pre tion, when viewed over centuries, has vious life, or the well-ordered cosmos been unambiguously expansive. Ever may require a great chain of being, in more people (and perhaps other beings which every creature knows its place, as well) have been granted the status of high or low, in the hierarchy. In The Re full moral persons. The broadening of public, Plato defines justice as exactly suffrage rights in the political realm has this sort of hierarchical order, in which roughly paralleled this process : first the brazen, silver, and golden classes property-owning white males, then all each fulfills its appointed tasks. Liber white males, then all males, then males al visions of meritocracy permit much and females. Arguments concerning per more social mobility than Plato's ideal sonhood are admittedly more complex society did, but also accept stratification and subtle than those concerning suf in life chances as inevitable, perhaps frage : there is more to being a moral per even desirable. How does inequality son than the right to vote. But both mor in life chances, especially initial life al and political arguments have proceed chances, come to be seen as a scandal? ed in tandem, along the track paved by Key to presuppositions about equality, analogical reasoning: if x is like y in all including equality of initial life chances, essential respects, then whatever rights is a slow but steady process of philo are accorded to x should in justice be sophical generalization about the nature accorded toy. Once the analogy is ac of personhood: who can be a person, knowledged, inequality becomes inde and what does being a person imply in fensible. terms of rights and duties ? This is a fas Of course, everything hinges on the cinating and convoluted history that has meaning of 'essential' in these analogi proceeded by fits and starts, with several cal arguments. The overall tendency - episodes of retrogression, and that is by again, a simplification of a long, halting, no means concluded. The metaphysical and meandering historical development foundations of personhood have repeat - has been to abstract one individuating edly shifted, from the possession of a ra trait after another from the definition of tional soul (wielded by sixteenth-centu essential personhood. Although some ry theologians at the University of Sala of these particulars may seem now to in manca as a mighty argument against the here in a social group rather than in an Spanish crown's putative right to exer individual, they have historically been cise dominion over the lives and prop felt to be intrinsic to their possessors : erty of the indigenous peoples in con noble blood, Jewish faith, French citi quered New World territories) to rights zenship. This is still more the case for guaranteed by Nature (as claimed by the characteristics commonly understood
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This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms to inhere in individuals : myopia, mathe ties refer, and the ethically paramount matical genius, red hair, a pleasing bari and ever more capacious reference class tone, six toes on one foot. None of these of personhood: these are the conceptual traits, and millions more like them, now preconditions not only for thinking in count as essential to personhood. Per terms of life chances but also for using sonhood stands opposed both to the cul life chances as a tool to think about jus tural and biological dimensions along tice. It should be noted that the lottery which individuality is currently defined. ensures equal chances, but not equal On the one hand, there are the cultural lives. Indeed, to use a lottery to achieve components of identity, which are as fairness only makes sense if the lots - in various as the cultures that form them : this case, the kinds of lives actually led - ethnicity, sexuality, religion, region. On are of unequal desirability. If human life the other, there are the genetic endow is something like a lottery, then every ments that are recombined with every one ought to have a fair chance, an equal act of sexual reproduction. Personhood chance. deliberately ignores all of them as irrele But should human life be something vant to the moral self (though not to al like a lottery? Who would want to live most any other kind of self). in Borges's Babylon? The discovery of What is the essence that is left when statistical regularities has drawn some all the individual contingencies of iden of Fortuna's sting: no life is certain, but tity are subtracted? This is a matter still neither is any life entirely uncertain. The fiercely debated : A capacity for reason ? same probabilities that make the mod An ability to feel sympathy for other per ern insurance industry profitable also sons? A central nervous system? How dampen the wilder oscillations of life ever, if ever, the debate is resolved (and chances, at least at the level of large ref if history is any guide, any resolution is erence classes. What might be called likely to be temporary), the result will be steady life chances - ones that are highly to insist on the strict moral equality of skewed (i.e., so large or small as to be all all genuine persons, regardless of what but certain in practice) and display little defining essence they are all thought to variation over long periods - are charac share. This conclusion holds for utilitar teristic of orderly societies. Predictabili ian as well as for deontological ethics : ty in and of itself need not be desirable : whether one believes that all persons are steady life chances may be grim (e.g., ends in themselves or that the good of seasonal storms that every year destroy the few can under some circumstances lives and homes) as well as gladsome be sacrificed for the good of the many, (e.g., a high probability that all children no one kind of person counts for more, will survive to adulthood). Nonetheless, is a higher end than any other. Person it is a characteristic aspiration of mod hood is at once the most inclusive and ern societies to increase predictability by the least homogeneous of human refer subjecting ever more aspects of human ence classes, but it is also the most im life to planning and, if possible, to con portant, at least as far as justice is con trol. The chanciness of life chances is cerned. We persons are all in this togeth under sustained attack. er : under these circumstances, fairness Although the ideal served by these and justice converge. concerted attempts to eradicate contin Statistical regularities, homogeneous gencies has yet to be articulated with reference classes to which the regulan the force and clarity of Borges's lottery
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This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms or Rawls's "original position," its out disasters both natural and manmade, lines can already be discerned. Not only war, and poverty. Because of the happy equality of life chances, but equally sta fact that at least some of the world's ble life chances for all would be its goals. population is spared these scourges, it In liberal polities, stability will be equat becomes part of the program to equal ed with individual control; in more ize life chances to try to eliminate or at ?tatist regimes, some centralized author least reduce the risks for everyone else. ity will hold the reins. Obviously, the de But the zeal for control has spread be cision as to who does the controlling, yond woeful accidents to all accidents. and how, will be politically and social To exercise 'control over one's life' has ly hugely consequential. But the main become perhaps the paramount goal of point here is the indomitable will to con the well-off, well-educated, and well trol, to straiten statistical regularities in placed minority who have already fared to near-certainties, however this goal is better than most in life's lottery. It is a achieved. If 'transparency' has become slogan emblazoned on the covers of self the cardinal political virtue in modern help manuals and built into the design democracies, 'control' is well on its way of international hotel chains and restau to becoming the chief desideratum of rants, which advertise their uniformity. the personal realm. It is as if the ancient For those who yearn for control, to be Aristotelian preference for activity over surprised, however innocuously, is to passivity had joined forces with the be ambushed by life. Their ambitions Kantian creed of autonomy over het resemble those of the ancient Stoics eronomy to advance the triumph of and Epicureans only in part. The an control over contingency: lives should cient philosophical sects sought to over no longer be allowed to happen ; they come chance by cultivating indifference, should be 'proactively' chosen and ar ataraxia, to everything then subject to ranged, from cradle (or before) to grave the caprices of Fortuna. In contrast, the (or after). Just as the appearance of new modern cult of control is anything but forms of insurance betokens a magnified indifferent to what Fortuna dispenses sense of responsibility (e.g., insurance and instead seeks to stop the wheel, once against property damage caused by one's and for all. children, now common in some Euro These efforts are most in evidence in pean countries), so new possibilities of the realm of new reproductive technolo control expand the sphere of delibera gies, because remarkable advances in tion. Yet however impressive the current biology have not only made new tech possibilities for control over the happen niques of control possible, but also pre stances of life may be, they are dwarfed sented the process of reproduction as a by the public appetite for still more con game of chance for the unborn, analo trol over ever more accidents, from the gous to the lottery of initial life chances trivial (the shape of one's nose) to the for newborns. Since the discovery of the momentous (the sex of one's child). structure of DNA and the deciphering of There are so many accidents with genetic codes, sexual reproduction has consequences so obviously grievous come to be understood as a bold experi for those who must suffer them that it ment in accelerated evolution. Instead of is impossible not to sympathize with manufacturing progeny identical to their efforts to control their incidence and parents by mitosis, as many microorgan effects. Among these are epidemics, isms do, organisms that reproduce sex
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This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ually vary the genotype with each new Beautiful ? Worse, isn't the revulsion Life, chance conception. Each offspring is therefore sometimes evoked by genetic technolo- cnanCes a surprise, a new (and, given the enor gies just the reactionary reflex that op mous number of possible combinations poses all change, the same reflex that of genes, probably also unique) individ once resisted smallpox inoculation and ual. Variations produced by the occa birth control? There is some merit to sional mutation are richly supplemented these arguments. But countervailing ar by the diversity of each successive gen guments must be weighed as well. Even eration ; natural selection thereby has those who reject naturalism in morals more materials to work on. In his aptly may uphold biodiversity on utilitarian titled book The Game of Possibilities, biol and aesthetic grounds : if the results of ogist Fran?ois Jacob described sexual elective cosmetic surgery to date are any reproduction among humans as "one indication, human control over the ge of the principal motors of evolution" : notype is more likely to narrow than "Diversity is one of the great rules of the broaden the spectrum of variety. And biological game. In the course of genera even those who do not believe in provi tions, those genes that form the patri dence may nonetheless find cause for mony of the species unite and separate rejoicing as well as regret in the contin to produce those combinations, each gencies doled out by the life lottery. time ephemeral and each time different, Many events can throw the best-laid which are individuals."8 Life itself is a plans into disarray: a move, an illness, grand lottery. a love affair, a death, and, above all, the Jacob took a dim view of cloning and birth and care of a child, that great ran indeed of all attempts to reduce diver domizer of human affairs. Some contin sity, cultural as well as biological, be gencies may end in sorrow, others in joy, cause they impoverished species 'pat but almost all result in the discovery of rimony' Less diversity brings an in something not known and not felt be crease in collective risk (e.g., of being fore. To query control is to query the wiped out by a virus to which no one reach of the human imagination and happens to be immune) and also in foresight. Can we, will we, rival the general monotony. But for those who ingenuity, the novelty, the surprises of consider chance itself to be a scandal, chance ? Can we simulate the power of to formulate reproduction in terms of contingency to teach, to test, and to en life chances is to invite attempts at con large experience - can any educational trol, inevitably less inventive and vari curriculum replace a curriculum vitae? ous than the play of combinations and The project of equalizing and improv permutations would be. ing life chances is a noble one and still a The party of control may well retort : long way from completion, as a glance at why should natural processes dictate tables of life expectancy worldwide suf human choices ? Isn't anxiety about fices to show. But it should not be con cloning or designer babies simply anoth fused, as it too often is, with the elimina er version of the naturalistic fallacy, set tion of chance in life. Fairness does not ting up Nature (writ large) as the stan imply certainty. The moral repugnance dard of the Good, the True, and the for contingency runs deep : chance sev ers the link between past and present, 8 Fran?ois Jacob, Le jeu des possibles (Paris : Fay intention and outcome, virtue and re ard, 1981), 127 -128 ; my translation. ward, vice and punishment. Above all,
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This content downloaded from 141.14.238.123 on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:14:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms chance seems to empty life of meaning : ones can be borne for the sake of exper better to believe in an angry god than a ience and experiment? All-or-nothing senseless streak of bad luck. Yet chance outcomes - either everything under con can also act as a catalyst to the making of trol or everything left to chance - are new meanings, both for individuals and nonstarters. The debate must assay pos whole cultures. New orders - philosoph sibilities, probabilities, and desirabilities ical, political, artistic, scientific - are in with a jeweler's balance. vented to encompass the contingencies This would also have to be a debate history has thrown up. Chance disrupts about the philosophy of fear, tradition tidy lives, unsettles habits - and taps un ally the most unphilosophical of the plumbed resources, both personal and passions. Accepting life chances entails social. more than demanding a fair chance in a There is no getting around the fact that lottery, whether Borgesian or Rawlsian. chance always implies risk. Some con We would also have to accept - not erad tingencies will be tragic, with outcomes icate - a modicum of fear. But perhaps not even Dr. Pangloss could redeem. The fear selectively and candidly confronted urge to control is an understandable and would take on a different aspect from often laudable response to real danger. the panicky, inchoate fear that robs us In its ancient version, the will to control of reason and humanity. David Hume was turned inward on the self: to con shrewdly observed that in situations of quer fear meant cutting ties of yearning perfectly balanced uncertainty (fifty and affection for anything and anyone fifty chances of a positive or negative subject to the vicissitudes of chance. outcome), fear preponderates over The modern version is turned outwards hope.9 His observation still holds true toward the world, but it too is driven by for some of the most secure societies fear. Strangely, the spectacular successes with the most favorable and equally dis of some modern societies in making tributed life chances humanity has ever many aspects of life more secure has on known - these are precisely the societies ly made their citizens that much more that create and consume a dazzling ar fearful. For decades, experts and politi ray of insurance policies.10 The ability to cians have discussed the nature and level calculate risk, even to control it, has not of acceptable risk, with all parties in tac tipped the balance in favor of hope. On it agreement to the assumption that an the contrary: the most secure societies ideal society would be as risk-free as pos seem by and large to be the most timor sible. If risks were to be tolerated, it was ous, the most cowed by the prospect of only because they were either inevitable future danger, whether probable or im or the cost of avoiding still more dreaded probable. Will facing up to fear as the risks, and in both cases the compromise price of chance restore hope to its at was a matter for regret. According to the least equal rights in our expectations? conventional wisdom of risk manage ment, the only good risk is no risk. A debate has yet to be joined about 9 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature how much chance, how much risk, is not [1739], ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), II.iii.9, 447. only tolerable but necessary and desir able for a life of learning and discovery. 10 Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Which life chances are unbearable - lots Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton Uni no one should have to draw - and which versity Press, 1988), 182 -187.
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