Research project Causation as a secondary quality

Our understanding of what causes what is essential to our grasp of ourselves and the world. It not only informs what we do to achieve our goals, but is also central to moral thinking. Whether one is to blame for a harm and liable to bear costs involved in mitigating it typically seems to depend on whether one caused it, and the wrongness of involvement in a harm seems to depend on whether one caused, enabled, or merely failed to prevent it.

In spite of its centrality, the notion of causation has resisted unified treatment. Attempts at general theories of causation have failed to systematically account for some range of cases of causation, either failing to account for cases where the effect would have occurred without the cause, or failing to distinguish being a cause of an outcome and merely affecting how it came about.

While causation itself has resisted unified treatment, previous work on our understanding of causation has been more promising. The otherwise baffling variety of cases of causation seem to have in common that they are picked out by cognition central to our capacity for identifying means to ends in practical deliberation.

Building on this, the project investigates whether causation can be understood as a “secondary" relation, as the relation that our capacity for identifying means to ends has as its function to track. It will further develop the hypothesis that causal judgments track means-end relations, and explore its consequences for the nature of causation.