He implicitly takes this ahistorical stance and justifies it with a metaphor that comes up frequently in his writing and debates. For example, in Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, he asks us to imagine a footrace where one person starts off way behind the rest at the starting line. Would this be unfair? “Yes, if the race is a hundred-yard dash.” But it is fair if this is a marathon, because “in a marathon, such a relatively small initial advantage would count for nothing, since one can reliably expect other fortuitous breaks to have even greater effects.” As a succinct
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