Against Counterfactual Miracles

There is a puzzle about the truth of counterfactual conditionals in deterministic worlds. It is natural to suppose that if things had gone differently in the recent past—if, say, you had blinked one more time than you actually did while reading the previous sentence—the state of the world in the distant past would still have been exactly as it actually was. It is also natural to suppose that if you had blinked one more time than you actually did, the laws of nature that characterize how the state of the world at earlier times constrains its states at later times would still have been true. But if determinism is true, the combination of the state of the world in the distant past with the laws of nature entails the complete truth about everything that happens, including the truth about how many times you blinked when reading that sentence. So we cannot hold fixed both the laws and the past: something has to give. We should be precise about the relevant sense of ‘determinism’. Let an intrinsic profile be an intrinsic property F such that, for any intrinsic property G, either it is metaphysically necessary that everything that has F has G, or it is metaphysically impossible for something to have both F and G. When F is an intrinsic profile that could be instantiated by an interval of time, let F’s history-proposition be the proposition that some initial segment