‘Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads,’ said my husband, tossing an imaginary coin. The same improbability was amusing when Rosencrantz won the toss 92 times in a row in Tom Stoppard’s play (1966). We know the odds for the next toss are 50-50, but we can’t help thinking it morally impossible for the lucky streak to go on.
This term morally impossible is not the same as something being immoral. The thickets here are tangled. As the Oxford English Dictionary points out with rare loquacity, Aristotle declared that moral philosophy cannot expect proofs that are mathematically certain. Aquinas quotes him when concluding that ‘in contingent matters, such as natural and human things, it is enough for a thing to be certain, as being true in the greater number of instances’. (In the Summa it’s Prima Secundae, q 96, article 1, reply to objection 3.)
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