CAUSATION- lec 10

Question 1

Double prevention

Answer 1

Suzy and Billy have grown up, just in time to get involved in World War III. Suzy is piloting a bomber on a mission to blow up an enemy target, and Billy is piloting a fighter as her lone escort. Along comes an enemy fighter plane,
piloted by Enemy. Sharp-eyed Billy spots Enemy, zooms in, pulls the trigger, and Enemy’s plane goes down in flames. Suzy’s mission is undisturbed, and the bombing takes place as planned. If Billy hadn’t pulled the trigger,
Enemy would have eluded him and shot down Suzy, and the bombing would not have happened. [Hall
‘Two
Concepts of Causation’]
This is a case of ‘double prevention’: Billy’s action contributes to the overall outcome by
preventing a preventer of Suzy’s blowing up the target.
But is Billy’s action a cause of the blowing up of the target in the same sense as Suzy’s is?
Someone arguing against counterfactual accounts of causation from this kind of case starts with
this question, and argues as follows:
1 Ordinary (pre-theoretic) intuition declares that the answer to the question is ‘No’ (Billy’s
action is part of the overall story of why the target got bombed, but it is not a cause of the
bombing).

2 No pure counterfactual account can explain why Billy’s action should not be treated as a cause
of the bombing (and/or the ‘it’s not causation’ intuitive verdicts for related examples).
3 A right account of causation must explain ordinary pre-theoretic intuitions as to which relations
are causal.
So
4 No pure counterfactual account of causation is right.

Question 2

Where does grasp of the concept of cause come from? Strawson’s ‘Causation and
Explanation

Answer 2

One central aspect of Hume’s discussion of causation was the claim that we can never observe
causal relations: we can observe event A followed by event B, and we can make repeated
observations of A-B pairs, but experience does not put us in contact with causal relations
themselves.

Strawson’s line of thought in ‘Causation
and Explanation’ takes off from the claim that the Humean doctrine of the non-observability of
causal relations is false.

• Strawson says that Hume is right that we don’t observe an abstract relation of causation
  between events. But he says we do observe specific relations which are causal relations

His suggestion is then that this experience of specific bringing something about transactions is
the source of our notion of causal intelligibility: to find a transition causally intelligible just is to
see it as similar to the pushes, liftings, flattenings and so on that we observe.
- He says that the search for causal theories in science is the search for interactions which
conform to the mechanistically intelligible kind: a scientific theory is a causal theory iff it deals
in such interactions.
- He notes that this view entails that a scientific theory that does not lay out relations the same in
kind as the relations we observe in pushes, pulls, liftings, crushings (etc.) in the world is not a
theory that provides causal explanations