Free Will on the Night Train

The night train to Melbourne pulled out of Sydney in the early evening, and by the time it had shaken itself free of the suburbs, Marta Ruiz had already decided that she disliked the man sharing her compartment. It was nothing he had done. He had simply folded his reading glasses with a precision that suggested he had opinions about how things ought to be folded, and she was too tired, after a semester of seminars on moral responsibility, to be patient with anyone who looked certain.

"Graham," he said, offering a hand that was all knuckles. "Retired. Civil engineer. Forty years of bridges, mostly in Queensland." When she told him she was a philosophy student from Salamanca, finishing an exchange year at a university in Sydney, he laughed in a way that was not quite unkind. "Philosophy. So you lot are still arguing about whether the chair exists." "No," Marta said. "At the moment we're arguing about whether you chose to sit on it."

That was how it began. Graham, it turned out, was a determinist of the cheerful, practical kind. Every bridge he had ever designed, he explained, had obeyed the same laws whether or not anyone approved of them. Loads, stresses, the expansion of steel in the heat: none of it was negotiable. "Why should the brain be any different? It's a lump of matter. Very clever matter, I grant you, but matter all the same. What you call a choice is just the last link in a chain that started long before you were born."

Marta had heard the argument a hundred times, but rarely from someone who had spent his life making things that did not fall down. She pointed out that if he really believed it, he would have to stop blaming anyone for anything, including the politicians he had been muttering about over his newspaper. "Responsibility doesn't vanish just because the universe is orderly," she said. "Plenty of philosophers think freedom and causation are compatible. You're free when you act on your own reasons, not when your actions are uncaused. An uncaused action wouldn't be free. It would just be random."

"Random," Graham repeated, as if tasting the word. "Now that's a different animal. Chance. I've seen what chance does. A bolt from a bad batch, a gust of wind at the wrong moment." He looked out of the window, where the darkness was broken only by the occasional lit platform of a town whose name slid past too quickly to read. "Doesn't seem to leave much room for your reasons, either."

Somewhere past Goulburn, the attendant came around to make up the beds, and the argument, interrupted, changed shape. Perhaps it was the odd intimacy of the bunks, or the knowledge that they would never see each other again, but when they resumed, they were no longer talking about chairs and bolts. Graham asked her, almost casually, whether she had ever made a decision she would undo if she could.

Marta was quiet for long enough that he apologized. Then she told him about her grandmother, who had fallen ill in March, in the middle of Marta's most important exams. Her mother had insisted there was no need to come home yet; the doctors were optimistic. Marta had stayed, had taken her exams, had done brilliantly, and had arrived in Salamanca two days after the funeral. "Everyone tells me it wasn't my fault," she said. "That I couldn't have known. Which is true. But I keep thinking that a part of me did know, and chose the exams anyway. And I can't decide whether that makes it better or worse."

Graham did not offer comfort, which she was grateful for. Instead, after a while, he told her about his brother, Neil. Thirty years ago, when their father died, there had been a quarrel over the family farm near Bathurst, the kind of quarrel that is about money on the surface and about something much older underneath. Graham had said things he could not take back, and then, out of pride, had refused to take back the things he could have. They had not spoken for twenty-two years. Neil had died of a heart attack in 2019. "I had his number the whole time," Graham said. "Every Christmas I'd look at it. Every Christmas I'd decide next year."

"So which is it?" Marta asked softly. "Were you free not to ring him, or was it just the chain?" He gave a short laugh. "That's the trouble, isn't it. When it suits me, I'm a determinist. Couldn't have done otherwise, pride runs in the family, my father was the same. And then at three in the morning I'm a firm believer in free will, because I know perfectly well I could have picked up the phone." "Maybe both are true," she said. "Maybe you couldn't have done otherwise then, given who you were. But who you were isn't fixed. Perhaps that's what regret is for. It's the chain noticing itself."

Neither of them slept much. Near Albury, where passengers once had to change trains because New South Wales and Victoria had built their railways to different widths, Graham told her that this was the only argument about free will he had ever enjoyed. Marta told him he had argued badly but honestly, which was rarer.

The sky was turning gray over the outskirts of Melbourne when Graham took out his phone. "Neil had a daughter," he said, not looking up. "Sarah. She'd be a bit older than you. I've never met her." He held the phone the way he had held his glasses the evening before, as though it were something that needed to be handled correctly. "Doesn't much matter whether I was free last time," he said. "Seems to me the only question worth asking is whether I'm free now." Marta took out her own phone, counted the hours back to Spain, and began to write to her mother.