Causality

Ways of Causing and Analyzing Causal Relations

There are many ways an agent can causally contribute to significant outcomes. Sometimes an agent is the direct and proximate cause of the relevant state of affairs. For example, if Jesse beats Jodi about the head, which results in Jodi's brain damage, Jesse is directly and solely responsible for Jodi's injuries.

An agent may play an indirect role in an outcome. For example, while Adolf Eichmann did not murder anyone directly, he was a significant player in a group effort to exterminate millions of innocent people.

Some consider whether an agent was a necessary cause or simply the actual cause ethically and legally relevant. It might be the case that the particular agent was necessary for the relevant consequences to follow. For instance, some might say that were it not for Robert Oppenheimer's group, the atomic bomb would not have been built. This “but for” analysis is called “counterfactual analysis,” and it aims to establish the requisite causal connection by hypothetically removing the alleged cause to see whether the effect still follows.

Such particularity is not necessarily required. Perhaps the agent was the actual cause of some state of affairs, but other agents would have caused similar outcomes had the particular agent not done so. For instance, perhaps Adolf Hitler's scientists were close to completing an atomic bomb and would have done so if Oppenheimer's group had not done it first. Theorists call this the NESS condition—a necessary element of a sufficient set. In instances when an outcome is overdetermined (more than one sufficient cause is present) or jointly determined (individual cogs being fungible), a NESS condition analysis can prove helpful.

Sometimes, intentional interference is causally relevant. In the above scenario, Oppenheimer and colleagues built the actual bomb in so doing they prevented a worse regime from acquiring the bomb. Had they not built the bomb, some might argue, their omission would causally affect others' abilities to cause harm.

Because both action and inaction can causally contribute to or prevent various significant effects, both the law and morality must parse the intricacies of the causal relationship between agent and outcomes very carefully, and oftentimes, on a case-by-case basis. For this analysis, one can refer to one of the first schemas of causation to illuminate many of the intuitions about causal responsibility.

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