Richard Taylor — Metaphysics, Fatalism, and the Good Life (1919–2003)

Richard Taylor was an American philosopher whose work ranged across metaphysics, ethics, the philosophy of action, and the nature of the good life — combining unusual clarity of prose with a willingness to follow arguments to unpopular conclusions and defend positions that the philosophical mainstream preferred to leave undefended.

A professor at Brown and Rochester whose beekeeping was as celebrated as his philosophy, he wrote with the directness of a man who thought that philosophical prose should be readable by anyone willing to think carefully — and whose later work on the virtues and the good life represented one of the more serious mid-century attempts to recover a genuinely Aristotelian ethics for the modern world.

His central concern: that the hardest philosophical questions — about freedom, fate, time, and what makes a life worth living — deserve honest engagement rather than technical evasion, and that the philosopher who retreats into jargon when the questions get difficult has failed the discipline's most basic obligation.

Fatalism — The Argument That Disturbed Everyone

Taylor's most famous and most controversial contribution to philosophy was his argument for fatalism — the view that the future is as fixed and unalterable as the past, and that human deliberation and choice are therefore as illusory as they would be if we were deliberating about the past.

His argument, presented in his textbook "Metaphysics" and in the essay "Fatalism" (1962), proceeded from assumptions about the logic of propositions — that statements about future events are either true or false now, even though we do not know which — and concluded that if a statement about the future is true, then the event it describes will occur, and nothing I do can prevent it. My deliberating, choosing, and acting are themselves among the fixed events of the universe — not causes of what will happen but part of what was always going to happen.

The argument provoked an enormous response — dozens of papers attempting refutation, entire symposia devoted to finding the flaw. Taylor engaged with the objections with characteristic directness, conceding what needed to be conceded and maintaining what he believed held firm. The precise point at which the argument fails — if it does fail — remains philosophically disputed, which is itself a measure of its genuine depth.

"I cannot do what I was not going to do — and whatever I was not going to do, I cannot do. This is fatalism."

Action and the Self as Cause

Taylor's work on the philosophy of action was closely connected to his concern with fatalism — and his response to the apparent determinism of the natural world was the development of what he called agent causation.

Standard accounts of causation, he argued, reduce all causation to event causation — one event bringing about another in a chain that extends back indefinitely. On this picture, the human agent disappears: what I do is just another event caused by prior events, ultimately traceable to conditions before my birth. There is no room for the agent as a genuine initiator of action.

Taylor proposed instead that genuine human action requires a different kind of causation — the agent as such, not merely events in the agent, as the cause of action. When I act, it is I who act — not my neurons, not my desires, not the prior state of the universe — but the persisting self who is the author of the action. This is metaphysically strange, he acknowledged — a form of causation that does not fit easily into the scientific picture of the world. But the alternative, he argued, is to abandon the concept of agency altogether, and with it everything we mean by moral responsibility.

"If I am the cause of my action, then it was within my power either to perform it or not to perform it — and this is all the freedom worth wanting."

Metaphysics — A Textbook That Changed How Philosophy Was Taught

Taylor's "Metaphysics" (1963) — a short, lucid introduction to the central problems of space, time, causation, the mind-body problem, freedom, determinism, and the self — became one of the most widely used philosophy textbooks of the second half of the twentieth century.

Its significance lay not only in its accessibility but in its intellectual honesty. Taylor did not present the standard positions and allow the student to choose — he argued for his own views, defended them against objections, and let the student see philosophy as it is actually practiced: as a first-person engagement with genuine puzzles rather than a catalogue of what various schools have thought.

The book's treatment of fatalism was particularly arresting — Taylor presented a sympathetic case for a position that most philosophers regarded as obviously wrong, forcing students to do the philosophical work of finding where exactly the argument failed rather than assuming its conclusion was refuted by its unpopularity. This pedagogical approach — presenting the strongest case for a challenging position and letting the student engage with it honestly — was itself a philosophical statement about what philosophy is for.

"Philosophy does not begin with answers. It begins with the realization that the questions are harder than they look."

Good and Evil — Ethics Without Illusions

Taylor's work in ethics took a distinctive turn in his later career — away from the technical apparatus of academic moral philosophy and toward a more direct engagement with the question of what it means to live well.

His book "Good and Evil" presented an ethics grounded in the facts of human nature and human flourishing — broadly Aristotelian in spirit but argued without the scholastic machinery that made Aristotle's ethics inaccessible to many readers. The good, on his account, was not an abstract standard to be derived from first principles but a condition of human beings — the actualization of our distinctive capacities for thought, feeling, and action.

He was skeptical of deontological ethics — the view that morality consists in following rules — and equally skeptical of the consequentialist reduction of ethics to calculation of outcomes. Both seemed to him to have lost contact with the living human reality that ethics existed to illuminate — to have replaced the question of how to live with a set of technical problems about rules and calculations.

"Good is what answers to the needs of sentient creatures — and evil is what frustrates those needs. Nothing more mysterious than this is required."

Having Love Affairs — Virtue Ethics and Erotic Life

Taylor's most unconventional and most personally revealing work was "Having Love Affairs" (1982) — a philosophical defense of adultery that drew on his virtue ethics and his conviction that the capacity for passionate love was among the highest human excellences.

The book was written in part from personal experience — Taylor had himself conducted extramarital affairs — and it argued, without apology, that the conventional morality of marriage and fidelity, when understood as mere rule-following, could be the enemy of genuine human flourishing. The person capable of intense romantic passion was, on his account, more fully alive than the person who had never felt such passion — and a morality that condemned this capacity rather than seeking to understand it had confused compliance with virtue.

The book was widely criticized — for its personal origins, for its conclusions, for what critics saw as an elaborate philosophical rationalization of behavior Taylor wanted to engage in. Whether those criticisms are fair depends on whether the philosophical arguments hold — and the arguments, whatever one thinks of their conclusion, are genuine arguments that deserve engagement.

"The capacity for passionate love is among the highest gifts that nature has bestowed on human beings — and to extinguish it in the name of duty is to diminish what is most human in us."

Legacy — The Honest Metaphysician

Taylor's reputation in academic philosophy rests primarily on his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of action — the fatalism argument, the agent causation theory, and the textbook that introduced generations of students to these questions in their most honest and challenging form.

He was not a system-builder — he did not produce a comprehensive philosophical framework that could be labeled and taught as a school. He was instead a philosopher's philosopher — someone who took difficult questions seriously, followed arguments where they led, and refused the comfort of positions held because they were respectable rather than defensible.

His beekeeping — he wrote about it with the same care he brought to metaphysics, and kept bees until very late in life — was not incidental to his philosophy. The attention to the particular, the living, the concrete; the preference for direct experience over abstract theory; the willingness to find genuine value in activities that academic culture did not recognize as serious — these were consistent expressions of a philosophical temperament that valued honesty above respectability and the examined life above the credentialed one.

On CivSim he sits alongside Morgenbesser and Barrett — philosophers who did their best work not by building systems but by taking individual questions seriously and being willing to say what they actually thought, whatever the consequences.

"The philosopher who makes no enemies has probably said nothing worth saying."