Just an accident

 I am reading a new biography of John Langshaw Austin, probably the chief figure in ordinary language philosophy. Rather than try to tell you what that is, let me give you an example.

Our concept of “accident” was influenced by Aristotle. He made a distinction between essential and accidental properties. If you are investigating what makes a human being human, it helps to focus on essential properties, rather on accidental properties, such as eye color or height.

The ancient Greeks had trouble defining the essential properties of humans. Humans are animals obviously. But what makes them distinct? Their sociability? Their moral faculties?

The essential properties proved tricky. But whatever it was that made a human being human, the accidental traits —whether a person had brown or blue eyes or was lefthanded or righthanded — didn’t matter. Two people could have different traits and still be human. Those traits were an accident, something that occurred by chance.

Students of logic don’t go far before absorbing the concept of “accident.”

But philosophical problems occur when concepts change, and the concept of “accident” has changed. Consider what’s happened since insurance companies started reckoning with automobiles.

An “accident” today is a car collision with no assignment of blame, even though everyone thinks, perhaps unfairly, that responsibility lies with the guy who was weaving in and out of traffic and who almost hit a pedestrian while driving on the shoulder to cut ahead of the car in front of him. But, since the collision occurred during a rare moment when the discourteous driver was in the proper lane and since assigning legal responsibility is an expensive process, no blame was assigned. It was just an accident.

Aristotle talked of accidents as events that lacked necessity — that occurred by chance. The sentence “The accident was inevitable” would have entailed a contradiction within the concept, making it incoherent.

Now, we speak of an accident as an “unfortunate event resulting especially from carelessness or ignorance.” We speak of “an accident waiting to happen.” It’s as if we are saying that the discourteous driver was so bad that the accident seemed almost necessary.

Maybe this is the simplest way to look at it: The senses of the word “accident” have evolved in different directions. What Aristotle called “accident” and what the insurance companies call an “accident” are not the same thing. We use the same word for contradictory concepts.

If you must think about accidents, be careful.

• Source: M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023.