PARADOXES

3: BURIDANS ASS
Michael Clark

A hungry, thirsty donkey is sitting exactly between

two piles of hay with a bucket of water next to each
pile, but there is nothing to determine him to go to
one side rather than the other. So he sits there and
dies. But imagine that one of us were in a similar
position between two tables of food and drink.
Wouldnt we go to one of the tables rather than sit
there and die?

Suppose that there is nothing in the animals causal history to incline him to one table rather than the other. In that
case, if all his actions are causally predetermined the
inevitable effects of prior causes, which themselves are produced by prior causes in a chain that goes back indefinitely
he will sit there and perish. If causal determinism is true of
animals, we might expect it to apply to people as well. Then
if someone found himself midway between the food-laden
tables, he would not be able to choose to go to one or the
other. He might, it is true, consider tossing a coin. The trouble is that there would be nothing to make him associate
heads with one table rather than another. Similarly, if he
decided to choose on the basis of which of two birds reached
a tree first: he would have no reason to associate a bird with
a particular table. If everything that happens is determined
by prior causes, he would stay there and die. And it does
seem possible in principle that he should find himself in
such a position. If he did, wouldnt he always find some way

Think spring 2003 69

In this regular series, Michael Clark, editor of Analysis, presents some of the most intriguing philosophical paradoxes. Here we examine the paradox of
Buridans ass.

Clark Paradoxes 70

of choosing a table to go to first rather than let himself starve

to death? If I concede that he will [starve to death], said
Spinoza (163277), I would seem to conceive an ass, or a
statue of a man, not a man. But if I deny that he will, then he
will determine himself, and consequently have the faculty of
going where he wills and doing what he wills.
Now causal determinism may not be true, but it is surely
not overturned as easily as this.
Consider what we would say if we came across what, as
far as we could tell, was a situation of this sort. If the man
did go to one of the tables, we could not be sure that there
was nothing undetected in his causal history that explained
his choice. If he stayed there and died, we would think he
was suicidal or had gone mad. But then people do commit
suicide, and they do go mad. In other words, in the unlikely
event that you found yourself between the two tables with
nothing to incline you to choose either table, you would either have good reasons for killing yourself or be in a situation where you were incapable of acting reasonably; and the
latter seems very like madness. So it looks as if the case of
Buridans ass fails to demolish causal determinism at a
stroke.
This paradox seems to have been wrongly attributed to
Jean Buridan, the fourteenth-century philosopher and scientist who wrote extensively about many liar-like paradoxes.
Further reading
Spinoza, Appendix to Ethics 2, in The Collected Works
of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1985). Spinozas response was:
I grant entirely that a man placed in such an equilibrium ...
will perish of hunger and thirst. If they ask me whether such
a man should not be thought an ass, I say that I do not
know just as I do not know how highly we should esteem
one who hangs himself, or ... fools and madmen... (p. 490).

This is reprinted from Paradoxes from A to Z, by Michael

Clark, by kind permission of Routledge.