Why an inevitable future need not make action idle
We have no reason for acting, and no reason for not acting.
Two different problems run together in the imagined surrender to nature. One concerns agency: if nature determines the outcome, does acting make any difference? The other concerns judgment: if the outcome is automatically called right, how could anyone decide beforehand what should happen? The next sentence sharpens the second problem. An event's occurrence vindicates it, while its prevention condemns it. The rule can approve either result after the fact, but supplies no independent standard for choosing between them.
The first problem has a precise ancient counterpart in the ‘idle argument’ reported by Cicero in On Fate, §§28–30. If recovery is fated, the argument says, you will recover whether or not you summon a doctor; if death is fated, the doctor cannot save you. Cicero reports Chrysippus's answer: recovery and calling the doctor can be linked or ‘condestinate’. The outcome can be settled together with the action that brings it about. A determined future need not occur regardless of what one does. This is Cicero's report of Chrysippus, not a surviving quotation inspected in Chrysippus's own work. On Fate, §§28–30, H. Rackham translation.
That distinction qualifies the paragraph without dissolving its central objection. Someone may understand intervention itself as part of nature's causal course, so inevitability alone does not establish the futility of acting. But causal efficacy still does not tell that person which outcome deserves pursuit. Conversely, a person could possess definite moral reasons to act while remaining uncertain about the eventual course of evolution. The comic mutilation for hypothetical wings exposes this second failure: a conjectured destination substitutes for a reasoned aim, and present capacities are sacrificed before either the prediction or its desirability has been established. The ancient comparison illuminates the inference; it does not identify Chesterton's unnamed opponents or establish borrowing from Cicero.
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