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Karla asked:
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Love: Is it causality, or is it destiny?
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============
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You pose this question as an either/or, but I don't think that it is. Of course, it depends on what you
are taking 'destiny' to be, but it seems to me that causality and destiny amount to the same thing.
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This is why. I take causality to mean the position that everything that happens has a determinate
cause. So, falling in love is just the effect of a lot of previous events, all of which jointly cause the
events that come to be described as 'falling in love'. Given the state of events at some time in the
past, before the lovers have met, then long chains of causes and effects bring about the falling in
love.
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So what is destiny? I take it to be the position that the lovers were destined — they could not avoid —
falling in love, even before they met. If the sort of strict causality I outlined above is true, then it is also
true that the lovers were destined to fall in love. Causality and destiny are the same.
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Of course, you can think of destiny as being something different — e.g. a god or gods deciding to
bring something about and hence interfering with causal chains. Then they are not the same. But
under my interpretation, both causality and destiny are consequences of determinism — the view that
things could not have turned out differently than they have, because people cannot make free
decisions between alternatives. That in itself is a tricky philosophical problem.
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Tim Sprod
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