If someone seeks to affect the ways of the world by acting in one way rather than another, it must be because she holds an outcome to be desirable and wants to contribute to its realisation. If she merely wished to confirm the most probable outcome on account of its high probability, she would have no reason to act at all. Her behaviour would have no normative substance. It would have no strategic charge. She would simply be floating, and she would be floating just for the sake of it.

I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So (…) we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say.

So if the deed is doomed to fail
I'll try it anyway

And if the world can't be saved
I'll save it anyway

And if hope is the curse of the damned
I'll feel it anyway

It's appealing, to have a course of action you'll still be following if it's unlikely to succeed at what you care about. Not- not because it's unlikely to succeed, not a self-destructive following of principle for the sake of principle to extremes… But there's a relief of a definiteness in it, that you could look out at the world and say — no matter what state you find it in, no matter how pointless or unchangeable, or how unsure you are that it isn't — still here, still worth it. Maybe even the only thing that is. (And that I don't trust, it's too sharp, 'only' is too big a word — but I recoil from it precisely because it resonates…)

Could be, it's about presumptiousness again… To allow myself to decide — yes, I know, I left my hero licence in my other coat, nothing-I-can-do, it's just that it doesn't change anything. I know your objections, hypothetical advice-giver, and my framing is reinforced against them so they can't strike it down if they try.

And that's terrifying, I'm told, something subtly wrong with it… That's not what you're supposed to do with arguments. Or, at least, the utterly wrong way to go about it. Then again, so's having 'presumptiousness' as at all a consideration, isn't it? It's hard enough to have actual realistic expectations of the world without also having to fight that thing to let you ever notice when there's something you can, in fact, affect…