Five Seats Infinite Questions – 13th June 2026

Is doing your best enough, or are you responsible for whether things actually work out?

Imagine four children who promise their mother that they will write to her regularly while travelling. Each one tries in a different way. One writes letters but casually gives them to unreliable people to post. Another writes and posts them, but does so carelessly: wrong boxes, wrong stamps, wrong details. A third writes and posts them properly, but the postal system fails. A fourth not only writes and posts them properly, but also phones to check whether they have arrived — and still, through no fault of their own, the letters never reach home.

None of the letters arrive. From the mother’s point of view, the promise has failed. But from the children’s point of view, the cases feel morally different. Some were careless. Some were unlucky. Some did almost everything that could reasonably be expected.

The thought experiment asks where responsibility ends. If you sincerely try to fulfil a duty, but the result does not happen, have you done your duty? Or does morality require not just good intentions and reasonable effort, but actual success?

This becomes much more serious when the stakes rise. Forget letters home: imagine sending a warning, cancelling an attack, delivering medicine, or protecting someone from danger. How much checking is enough? At what point does “I tried” stop being a defence?

Are we judged by our intentions, our efforts, our care, or by what actually happens?

“Ought implies can.”
Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason

If luck hands you something that is not yours, when does keeping it become stealing?

Imagine going to a cash machine and asking for £100. Instead, it gives you £10,000, while your bank account is only charged £100. You did not hack the machine. You did not threaten anyone. You did not intend to take what was not yours. The money simply appeared in your hands because of someone else’s mistake.

At first, you expect the bank to notice and ask for it back. But weeks pass. Nobody contacts you. The temptation grows. The bank is wealthy. It is probably insured. It was their error, not yours. Compared with their vast profits, the loss is tiny; compared with your life, the money could make a real difference.

But then the uncomfortable thought remains: the money is not yours. The fact that the mistake benefited you does not make it a gift. What began as an accident may become a deliberate act the moment you decide to keep quiet and spend it.

The thought experiment explores self-serving reasoning. We are often excellent lawyers for our own desires. We find arguments that sound moral — no one is hurt, they can afford it, it was their fault — when really we may simply want permission to keep the cash.

Is taking advantage of someone else’s mistake a stroke of luck, or a quieter form of theft?

“It is easy for a man to do a wrong thing, and hard for him to know that he has done it.”
Henry Sidgwick – The Methods of Ethics

Can your past self make binding decisions for the person you become?

Imagine that, years ago, someone made a solemn declaration: “If I ever become the kind of person who believes this, supports that, or lives in that way, stop me.” Perhaps they even wrote it down. At the time, they meant it sincerely. Their younger self was clear, passionate, and certain.

Twenty years later, they have changed. Their politics, values, relationships, and sense of self are different. What once seemed unthinkable now seems reasonable. Then an old friend appears, determined to hold them to their earlier instruction. After all, if we accept that people can make living wills or advance decisions about their future medical treatment, why not other serious instructions from the past?

The question is unsettling because we often treat ourselves as continuous beings. We make promises, sign contracts, marry, borrow money, plan careers, and prepare for future illness. Yet we also change. Sometimes dramatically. The person who made the promise may no longer feel identical to the person who must live with it.

This thought experiment asks how much authority a past self should have over a future self. Are we bound by who we once were, or does the present person have the right to overrule the past?

When we change deeply, are we still keeping promises to ourselves — or being governed by a stranger who happens to be our younger self?

“There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different.”
David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature

Can an all-powerful God do the logically impossible, or is nonsense still nonsense even for God?

Imagine a philosopher speaking with God. God declares that he is all-powerful: there is nothing he cannot do. The philosopher begins with an easy challenge. Can God turn everything blue into red, and everything red into blue? God does so.

Then comes the harder challenge: can God create a square circle?

God says yes — and produces a square. The philosopher objects. That is not a square circle; it is simply a square. God could rename it a circle, but that would not make it genuinely circular. The challenge is not to change the meanings of words, but to create something that is both a square and a circle at the same time.

The puzzle is that a square circle is not merely hard to make. It appears to be logically impossible. A square is a four-sided figure. A circle has no sides. To ask for a four-sided figure with no sides may not be asking for a miraculous object, but failing to ask for anything coherent at all.

This thought experiment asks what we mean by omnipotence. If God cannot create a square circle, is that a limit on divine power? Or does it show that logical contradictions are not “things” to be created in the first place? Many traditional believers, including Thomas Aquinas, argue that God can do all things that are possible, but contradictions are not possible things.

So perhaps the real question is not whether God has enough power, but whether words can trick us into imagining a task where there is only confusion.

Does omnipotence mean the power to do absolutely anything, or the power to do anything that can meaningfully be done?

“Whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence.”
Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologiae