Fact or Value

In December 2000, a controversial Supreme Court decision about ballots in Florida handed the American presidency to the hawkish, climate-sceptic George W. Bush. Had his rival Al Gore prevailed, global emissions would have been stabilized, the subprime mortgage crisis averted, and the Middle East would have avoided the tragic path it was pushed on.

Or would it? Can we do more than imagine such stale alternatives? Can counterfactuals be something other than historical storytelling? Can our answers to ‘what if’ be as disciplined as our answers to ‘what was’?

In this lecture on counterfactual history, philosopher Martin Bunzl will shift our focus from the unconstrained speculative imagination to the narrow channels of laws, natural, rational and causal. He argues that counterfactual exercises can be grounded in the same methodological principles that underpin evidence-based history. In doing so, Bunzl leads us to the startling historical judgement that counterfactual thinking is not incompatible with determinism.

Martin Bunzl is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Rutgers University and author of Real History and numerous works on causality and the philosophy of history.