Common-sense causation in the law

Judges often invoke ‘common sense’ when deciding questions of legal causation. I draw on empirical evidence to refine the common-sense theory of legal causation developed by Hart and Honoré in Causation in the Law. I show that the two main common-sense principles that Hart and Honoré identified are empirically well founded; I also show how experimental research into causal selection can be used to specify these principles with greater precision than before. This exploratory approach can provide legal scholars with a plausible new set of hypotheses to use in re-examining the decided cases on legal causation. If correct, the new common-sense theory that I develop has important implications not only for debates within legal scholarship, but also for judicial practice on issues of legal causation across both criminal and private law

Overdetermined Causation Cases, Contribution and the Shapley Value

The overdetermined causation cases (duplicative causation, concurrent causes, etc.) challenge the consistency and relevance of the but for test in torts. A strict application of the but for criterion to these cases leads to paradoxes and solutions that violate common sense. This explains why a large amount of literature has been developed in philosophy and jurisprudence to provide more accurate causation criteria. This paper adds to this literature by considering over-determination cases from an economic and mathematical point of view. Following Martin van Hees and Matthew Braham in their 2009 article Degrees of Causation, we consider over-determined cases through cooperative game theory and define “overdetermined causation games”. We characterize these games in terms of marginal contribution to the great coalition and we provide a typology of different overdetermined causation cases. Lastly, we apply to these games a traditional sharing rule developed in cooperative game theory, the Shapley value, to assess the “causal” contribution of each tortfeasor

Analysing Causation in Light of Intuitions, Causal Statements, and Science

30 p.The aim of this paper is to provide an account of causation that is compatible with both common sense intuition and science. In the next section, I briefly rehearse the most important philosophical strategies for analysing the concept of causation. Then I investigate, in the third section, criteria of correctness for a philosophical theory of causation. In the fourth section, I review some important counterexamples to the traditional accounts mentioned in the second section, and suggest, in the fifth, that these counterexamples can be seen as grounded on two kinds of intuitions. The sixth section presents results of the linguistic analysis of common sense causal statements. In the seventh section, I offer an analysis of causality in agreement with the criteria elaborated in the third section: Relations of causal responsibility make true causal statements of one type identified in the sixth section, and underlie the intuitions such statements express. Such relations contain as a part another, simpler relation: the causal relation between events, which makes true statements of the other sort identified in the sixth section. The eighth section answers two important objections, one against the thesis that facts can be causes, the other against the thesis that events can be causes

Razones, justificación y causalidad

En trabajos anteriores (especialmente en “Davidson y la eficacia causal de la mente” y “Reason and causation in Davidson’s theory of action explanation”) sostuve que el origen del epifenomenismo de las propiedades mentales en el monismo anómalo de Davidson se halla en la independencia con la que este autor concibe las condiciones de justificación y de causalidad en su análisis de las explicaciones de la acción mediante razones. En este trabajo concibo este diagnóstico como un síntoma de un problema más profundo, a saber, la aceptación, por parte de Davidson, en su defensa del carácter causal de las razones, de un concepto de causalidad humeano-hempeliano que nunca llega a justificar, en lugar de limitarse al concepto ordinario de causa que él mismo evoca inicialmente. Si Davidson se hubiera mantenido fiel a este concepto ordinario, de sentido común, el epifenomenismo sobre las propiedades mentales no habría llegado a surgir.In some previous papers (especially in “Davidson y la eficacia causal de la mente” and in “Reason and causation in Davidson’s theory of action explanation”) I held that the origin of the epiphenomenalism about mental properties that infects Davidson’s anomalous monism lies in the independence with which this author conceives of the conditions of justification and causation in his analysis of reasons explanations of actions. In the present paper I take this diagnostic to be a symptom of a deeper problem, namely Davidson’s acceptance, in his defense of the causal character of reasons, of a Humean/Hempelian conception of causality which he never justifies, instead of restricting himself to the ordinary, common sense notion of cause that he himself initially mentions. Had Davidson abided by this ordinary, common sense concept, epiphenomenalism about mental properties would not even have loomed up

The ontology of causal process theories

There is a widespread belief that the so-called process theories of causation developed by Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe have given us an original account of what causation really is. In this paper, I show that this is a misconception. The notion of "causal process" does not offer us a new ontological account of causation. I make this argument by explicating the implicit ontological commitments in Salmon and Dowe's theories. From this, it is clear that Salmon's Mark Transmission Theory collapses to a counterfactual theory of causation, while the Conserved Quantity Theory collapses to David Fair's phsyicalist reduction of causation

Kim on Causation and Mental Causation

Jaegwon Kim’s views on mental causation and the exclusion argument are evaluated systematically. Particular attention is paid to different theories of causation. It is argued that the exclusion argument and its premises do not cohere well with any systematic view of causation

Determinism and Causation Examples

In studying causation, many examples are presented assuming that determinism holds in the world of the example such as the notoriously difficult to resolve preemptive and preventative situations. We show that for deterministic examples that this conditional preemptive situation is either (i)vacuously true, (ii)contradictory, or (iii) implies indeterminism. Along the way we formulate a specific block space-time definition of determinism, and suggest that commonsense causation theories need focus on unphysical quantities and indeterminism

Non-Locality and Theories of Causation

The aim of the paper is to investigate the characterization of an unambiguous notion of causation linking single space-llike separated events in EPR-Bell frameworks. This issue is investigated in ordinary quantum mechanics, with some hints to no collapse formulations of the theory such as Bohmian mechanics.Comment: Presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Modality, Probability and Bell's Theorems, Cracow, Poland, August 19-23, 200