On Asking Why #

We so often as "why". It is interesting to ponder¹ what this question really means, because I think this will assist us in asking "why" more fruitfully, and also highlight certain situations where our this question goes out of bounds.

Every "Why" Implies A Counterfactual #

Any "why" question implies a counterfactual.

If you ask a normal person, who hasn't read so much philosophy that they are afflicted by thinking about things too rigorously, what "why" means, they'll likely tell you that it's a question that gets at the cause of something.

But, when we consider what "causality" really means, it's basically impossible to pin down a single "cause" to almost anything. Anything in our past light-cone will have some bearing on the current state of the universe, even if only in the most minor – perhaps even undetectable – way.² Even if we limit it to some sense of "proximate" causes, how proximate?

For example, let's consider an incredibly boring story. Say I have the idea of making eggs for breakfast tomorrow, and I notice that I am out of eggs. I check the time, it's not too late, and I don't have anything to do for the next hour. So I look for my noise-canceling headphones, because it's not like I'm going to raw dog the grocery store sound hellscape, and it takes me about 15 minutes to find them. Then I get on my bike, head to the store, buy some eggs, and come home. The next morning, I cook eggs.

You walk into the room, and say "Oh, why did you make eggs?"

I'd be tempted to say something like, "I haven't made eggs for breakfast in a while, and I like them." Or, I might just say "It's breakfast."

It'd be strange, but not incorrect, for me to answer with:

• The store had them.
• 8000 years ago, people of Southeast Asia began capturing and raising red junglefowl instead of merely hunting them in the wild. Over time, owing to selective breeding and the blending of multiple maternal lineages, their eggs progressively grew in size, regularity of production, and nutritional content, and became a staple of many diets around the world. Farmers keeping chickens found eggs to be a reliable source of food in the morning, as many chickens lay eggs in the early hours of the morinng. In the industrial revolution throughout Europe and America, the origins of much of my cultural background, eggs further became associated with a convenient and portable high-protein morning meal. So that's why I made eggs.
• My bike was functional.

However, these facts are every bit as essential to the event you're asking about. They are, in just as real a sense, the "cause", as anything else.

Now let's say that, as soon as I have the idea to make eggs in the morning, I say to you, "I'll make eggs tomorrow morning." The next morning, you come into the room, and see that I'm not making eggs, so you ask "Oh, why didn't you make eggs?"

Some perfectly unremarkable answers might be:

• Oh! I forgot about that plan, thanks for reminding me. Go off to make the eggs.
• Turns out we're out of eggs, and I didn't get to the store to buy them.
• I went to the store, but they were out of eggs.
• Tragedy! The eggs fell on the ride home from the store, and all smashed!
• My bike has a flat, so I couldn't get to the store to buy eggs.
• I couldn't find my headphones, and cannot possibly enter the store without active noise cancelation.

In cases where a counterfactual can't reasonably exist, any question of "why" is nonsense.

By asking "why" something is, "why" it happened, etc., we are in fact presuming a counterfactual world, in which the thing did not happen, did not exist, and so on. Then, we are attempting to calculate the delta between that counterfactual world, and our own di.

2025-11-14draftsphilosophy