Car Seats and the Absurd

Copyright © 2002 by Joel Marks
Originally published in Philosophy Now magazine, no. 38, October/November 2002, page 51

The extra minute you take to secure your child into her car seat could be just what it takes to bring your whole family into the path of a Mack truck half an hour down the road.

But that is obvious. It is the cruel, rueful, and ironic face of the contingency of existence. And of course it can work the other way around: Had you not taken the extra minute to secure your child into her car seat, you might have driven right into the path of a Mack truck. What does this tell us? Only, one might suppose, that we do not know the future. It doesn't change the fact that the only rational way to conduct one's affairs is to consider the odds: Children in automobile accidents are more likely to survive if they are strapped into a car seat. Therefore it is rational, not to mention morally obligatory, to do this for your child, even though it is within the realm of possibility that there will be a freak coincidence of circumstances, which converts your caring action into a contributing cause of the very catastrophe you were attempting to avert.

Only ... further reflection leads me to make a more bizarre inference. Put aside for the moment our epistemological situation and consider the metaphysics. Do you grant the following? Most accidents where there is a child passenger and an adult who has been responsible enough to purchase a car seat and secure the child into it, will not be due to some such aggravating factor as the driver drunkenly weaving in and out of traffic or drag racing or the like. Rather, the scenario will more likely be one of encountering some other car which has such a driver, or of the first driver's doing something foolishly spontaneous, like miscalculating when the light was going to change, OR of his being momentarily distracted, as by the family dog wagging his tail in the driver's face at a bend in the road, etc. In sum, I assume that the typical accident involving a child in a car seat occurs because the car was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Accidents are the thing of a moment, and moments are conditioned as delicately as a house of cards.

But if that is so, then do we not arrive at a rather startling conclusion, namely, that it is not the freak coincidence, but in fact the norm that accidents involving a child secured into a car seat would not have happened at all if the child had not been secured into the car seat? The logic of my argument is that everything else would have remained the same ... ceteris paribus, to use a logician's term. And I think that is a reasonable assumption in most cases. For instance, your not taking an extra minute with the car seat (because you were rushed, say) would not in any way affect whether the driver of the Mack truck takes another drink, or runs the stop light, etc. So that truck would still be at the very spot it would otherwise have been had you taken the extra minute. Except that because you didn't, there would be no accident: Your car and the Mack truck would pass through the same space but at different times.

In other words, although your alternative behavior would indeed affect the whole universe given enough time, the vast majority of the universe would remain the same in the short term. It is like the ripples in a pond after you plunk the pebble in: They will eventually reach the far shore and make the frog croak, but at first a nearby fish will not even notice anything has happened. Just so, the fate of the Mack truck and its driver, and of all who would be affected by them in turn into the indefinitely far future, would not begin to alter until later, after the moment at which the accident would have occurred. Up until then, all else with the truck and driver would be identical, so the accident won't occur provided you are careless about the car seat.

Singing the praises of car seats because your child's life has just been saved by one seems, therefore, as odd as extolling the virtues of kidnappers because your child has just been released by one. It is understandable, of course; there is a certain psycho-logic to it since your relief makes you feel grateful. But in strictly logical terms ... it ain't, is it?

Nonetheless, it is still true that it is rational (and, again, surely also ethical, even morally obligatory) to strap the child in. That is because the epistemology of the human condition leaves us with no rational option for deciding what to do other than relying on known, general probabilities. And in this case they presumably tell us that in otherwise matched populations, the one employing car seats will suffer fewer casualties. You simply cannot outwit Mother Nature on this one.

I conclude that ... life is absurd. (Although it is perhaps also absurd to employ logical argument to arrive at such a conclusion. But then ... life is absurd!) For the summation of the above is that it is rational to use a car seat for the safety of your child, even though on any actual occasion when the car seat shows its effectiveness for that purpose, it has likely also occasioned the risk to which your child has been exposed. In short, the car seat (in any given case but not in general) brings about the need for itself. It sounds like a marketer's dream ... or a metaphysical wizard's "perpetual justification engine" ... or the answer to a theologian's prayers for a Necessary Being ... but it is really a kind of joke, akin to: "Why am I hitting myself on the head with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop!" Also, this realization seems to have no practical import, and yet it changes everything, like a Gestalt shift (as from the contour of a vase to two facial profiles).

The Car Seat Paradox REDUX

August 5, 2018

Note: The following essay is a much expanded consideration of the above puzzle from 2002. At that time I concluded that life is absurd. I still think life is absurd, but at least I am now able to offer a detailed explanation of why it is (nevertheless) rational to use car seats.

Note: Despite the puzzle, I reiterate in the strongest terms that I believe (for the reasons given) it would be irrational not to use a car seat, and I encourage everybody to use a car seat when conveying a child.

We atheists or agnostics and even some thoughtful or compassionate believers know why it is ridiculous for the sole survivor(s) of an airplane crash to thank God: What loving, all-powerful and omniscient God would stand by, not to mention cause, a horrific event like this? Only an extreme egotism would suggest our meriting such special regard (God has a plan for me!) as to be spared the terrible fate that befell everyone else. Why not instead curse a deity who is so cruel and capricious, or at least callous?

            It may come as a surprise, however, that it is also ridiculous to thank God (literally or simply as an expression of emotion) that we strapped our child into a car seat when she has been spared injury or death in an automobile accident. (And let us suppose everyone else involved was also spared.) It certainly came as a surprise to me when I had this thought many years ago, and I have struggled to make sense of it ever since.

            Here is the basic idea. An accident while driving is typically a matter of bad timing (whatever else it may also involve, such as carelessness or bad luck). The smash-up occurred only because you entered the intersection at the exact moment a drunk coming down the cross street ran the light. The dog chose to jump into the front seat at just the moment you entered the bend. The deer leapt into the road just as you were passing by the thicket that had hidden her from view. You turned your attention from the road to your Google map just as the car next to you started drifting into your lane because the driver was texting his boss. And so on.

            Meanwhile, using a car seat takes a few moments. Here are instructions from a YouTube video:

To buckle the child you’re going to want to start with your harness straps nice and loose. Then you’re going to put the child’s arm through the hole. Make sure the shoulder strap is over their shoulder, and buckle between the legs. Do the same thing on the other side. … And now buckle the chest clip. But importantly keep the chest clip low. If you move it up to the right place right now, as you tighten your strap it’s going to get caught under the child’s throat, and that would not be comfortable. Now I’m going to take hold of the shoulder straps anywhere above the chest clip. I’m going to pinch them and pull firmly upward. See how I gathered all the slack out of the legs, out of the stomach and up to the shoulders? If I need to I can slide the chest clip down a little bit at this point. Now I’m going to take the tail at the bottom of the seat and I’m going to pull firmly. The I’m going to check. I’m going to pull upward again on the shoulder strap, checking that no slack comes up towards the shoulders. I’m going to put a finger at the collar bone and pull it away from the child’s body. One finger should fit. But if you can do a two-finger salute like this, that is too loose. So I have a little bit left to pull out from the tail, and now when I check – again, pull upwards – there’s no slack that came up. … Next I’m going to move the chest clip up so that the top of it is at the top of the armpits. I like to call it the tickle clip to remind you to run your fingers across the top and tickle the child’s armpits.           

So what first occurred to me was that an accident in which a child is saved by a car seat might very well not even have occurred if the driver had not used a car seat. Why not, then, curse God (or your partner or the manufacturers of car seats or your own conscientiousness or just your unlucky stars) for inducing you to spend so much time making sure your child was properly strapped into the car seat, since this served only to place your car in the wrong place at the wrong time?

But of course there is an obvious reply. On some other occasion you might with equal likelihood, and for the same reason of bad timing, have ended up in a different accident if you had not used a car seat. And this time – what is even worse – your child would not have been protected and so been more likely to be injured or killed.

Well, OK: This sounds like a good reason for people to use car seats. This is what makes it rational, perhaps even morally obligatory, to use them. Nevertheless, I find something peculiar about the situation. For one thing, it is not clear what bearing the rationality of using car seats has on your emotional reaction to your child being saved by your having used a car seat. While it is true (or I will assume) that a society in which people regularly use car seats has lower casualty figures for children in moving vehicles, it still seems, by my reasoning above, that on any particular occasion when a child is saved by a car seat, it might well or even usually have been better if a car seat had not been used. After all, your motivation for using a car seat is not public spirit. You are not first and foremost trying to make society safer (as your motive might be if, say, you sent your offspring off to war); you are trying to make your child safer. So how could it be rational to be happy you had used a car seat on the particular occasion when it would have been better if you hadn’t, just because (as if by a statistical hand) widespread use of car seats is beneficial to society?

I don’t buy, by the way, that you yourself would have been in a different accident with your child had you not used a car seat and hence avoided this accident. That’s just superstition. Most people do not get into an accident when driving with their children. So you would be mighty unlucky if you not only got into an accident while using a car seat but also would have gotten into one (on this or a different occasion) if you had not used a car seat on this occasion.

Now, it is old news that a rational action can lead to an undesired outcome. Rationality is what we rely on in practical affairs precisely in the absence of certainty. What is rational to do is what is the most likely to achieve our ends under the circumstances; but this implies that sometimes things won’t turn out as we want them to even when we behave rationally. It is irrational to refuse to fly just because, in an exceptional case, an airplane will crash; but if most flights crashed, it would be better not to have boarded an airplane most of the time, and hence it would not be rational to fly for routine purposes. What creates the air of paradox in the present case is that it is better not to have used a car seat in most of the cases when the car seat does exactly what we want it to. This is the rule, not the exception. How, then, could it be rational to use a car seat?

            The answer, I now think, goes like this. What we want and expect a car seat to do is protect our child in an accident. This is surely rational because car seats have (I presume) been amply demonstrated to reduce the likelihood of injuries to children in accidents. What is not rational, however, is something different, namely, to use car seats in order to prevent accidents. That is not rational because there is no reason to think that using car seats is more likely to prevent accidents than not using them. In particular, as we have seen, the timing argument works equally well either way. Ergo Q.E.D.: It is rational to use a car seat to protect your child in case of an accident, even though if an accident occurs, it might well or even usually have been better had you not used one.

Here’s another way to think about the kind of situation I am talking about. There are actually two main ways that using a car seat could help to protect your child. Only one of them is if you are in an accident. An even better way is if the mere passage of time it takes for you to strap that wiggly body into that complex array of straps causes you to miss out on being in an accident in the first place. This means that when you are expending time and effort in this way you are contributing to one of the following consequences (although you don’t know which): (1) You will narrowly miss being in accident; (2) You will be in an accident but the car seat plays no further role (the child will be hurt or unhurt as much with as without the car seat); (3) You will be in an accident and the car seat makes it worse (I will omit the gruesome details); (4) You will be in an accident and the car seat works as advertised, and intended and hoped, to spare your child (greater) injury. All of these are highly unlikely.

Much more likely is that your using a car seat makes no difference whatever: You won’t be in an accident when driving with your child whether you use a car seat or not. So why bother using a car seat? What is more, of the four scenarios wherein your use of the car seat does make a difference, three of the four cause an accident while only one (1) prevents it, and of those three, one (3) even makes things worse in the case of the accident. So it looks like using a car seat actually makes things worse!

But that last calculation is cheating, since the likelihood of (1) equals the combined likelihood of (2)-(4): Your using a car seat is just as likely to prevent as to cause an accident. So those cancel out. Furthermore, among (2)-(4), one (3) makes things worse, one (4) makes things better, and one (2) is neutral; so these too would seem to cancel out. However, this still leaves the question: What is now left to tip the balance toward the rationality of using a car seat? The answer is clear: the greater likelihood of (4) than (3). A car seat is much more likely to help than to harm in an accident.

We are not home free yet. The percentage of cases in which there is an accident involving a child in a car seat is still very small. Why, then, go to all the expense of purchasing a car seat and the trouble of using it? Is this just another capitalist scheme to scare us into buying something we don’t need? No. The standard analysis of risk provides the solution: We are concerned not only about the probability of an event, but also the nature and magnitude of the event. It is very unlikely that your house will burn down while you and your family are in it; but the magnitude of such a loss counsels the relatively minor expense and inconvenience of installing smoke detectors and testing them every week. Just so, the death or injury of your child in an automobile accident is very unlikely, but it would be a harm of such magnitude that you are wise to purchase and use a car seat.

So we have managed to dispel any suspicion that it is irrational to use a car seat. But this has not been my concern in the first place. No, the wrinkle that wrinkles my brow is that it is rational to use a car seat. Why does this perplex me? Because, as I keep saying, a car seat works as advertised in an accident just in case its use was (more often than not) responsible for causing the accident. And that’s not all: It remains rational (and probably also obligatory from a moral point of view) to use car seats despite its turning out to be the case that one’s happiness at having used a car seat in the case of an accident where it worked as advertised is misplaced. This to me has it all over Sisyphus in the absurdity department.

So I doubt that the logical explanation of the rationality of using car seats will penetrate so deeply into the psyches of even most of us who understand it to change our feelings (now that we have been bitten by the bug of paradox). Speaking for myself, if I am ever in an accident where a child is saved by my having used a car seat, I am sure I will thank my lucky stars that I used it. I liken this phenomenon to visual illusions, which will often persist even after we come to understand they are illusions. For example, the parallel lines in the Müller-Lyer will likely forever appear of unequal length, no matter how often we measure them with a ruler.

            Of course there is a legitimate source of joy after the accident we have been discussing, namely, that the child has not been hurt or hurt badly or killed. Even if you could kick yourself for having used a car seat on this occasion (which would be irrational – just as well rail against your partner for kissing you goodbye before you got into the car), since you did use one and ended up in an accident it is wonderful that she was not hurt. Thank God!

            But let me finally reiterate that I do not conclude that using a car seat is irrational. (If this article gains popular currency, I know that it will be misread on a thousand occasions by those who merely skim it.) Quite the contrary: I believe it would be irrational not to use one, and I encourage everybody in the strongest terms to use a car seat when conveying a child. But it is precisely this that creates the sense of puzzlement, namely, that it is rational to use a car seat despite its having the feature I have been describing. So I do not dispute that it is rational to use a car seat, but I marvel that it is.

Note to analytic philosophers: Our discipline is riddled with tantalizing thought experiments that have challenged both common sense and deeply held theories. There is the Gettier Problem, the prisoner’s dilemma, Mary the visual neuroscientist, Nozick’s experience machine, Parfit’s split brain speculations, the Chinese Room, the Nonidentity Problem, the Knobe Effect, and so on. The car seat paradox (so to speak?) has the feel of a perfect thought experiment to me. Unfortunately I have not been able to come up with any great issue it might speak to, so this could be yet another illusion generated by the rationality of using car seats. However, I am sure that the actual genesis of many of our favorite thought experiments was not from wrestling with a philosophical issue but just from having a puzzle suddenly occur to somebody. So I invite my colleagues to find some application(s) of this puzzle-in-search-of-an-issue that would ultimately earn it a place in the pantheon of Great Gedanken Experiments. Could this quirk in the rationality of using car seats be, as it were, the next precession of the orbit of Mercury that will change the universe of knowledge? My delusion of grandeur doth entertain the prospect.

            Alternatively, you are invited to argue or demonstrate that there is no quirk to begin with, for example, by coming up with a counterexample. That would be an act (other than using a car seat) that is rational despite the fact that, most of the time it achieves its purpose, it would be better if it had not been done, and yet does not strike us as odd for that fact. I have not been able to come up with one, nor (by my lights anyway) have my interlocutors; yet I certainly cannot rule out that there is a whole class of such acts. But even in that case, it may yet be possible to salvage something of value if the existence of this feature of some rational acts (viz., that, most of the time they achieve their purpose, it would be better if they had not been done) is felt to alter our conception of rationality in an interesting way, even if for no further reason than that it had never before been noticed.

Many thanks to Thomas Pölzler and Mitchell Silver for very helpful assistance in unraveling this puzzle (if not my puzzlement).