Omissions, Causation, and Responsibility

Causation and Responsibility

In this article I examine the relation between causation and moral responsibility. I distinguish four possible views about that relation. One is the standard view: the view that an agent’s moral responsibility for an outcome requires, and is grounded in, the agent’s causal responsibility for it. I discuss several challenges to the standard view, which motivate the three remaining views. The fin...

[Individual causation and responsibility in lethal accidents].

Legal causation and responsibility for causing harm.

In the legal setting, "cause" is composed of at least two distinct components, of which only one is related to "causality" as scientists understand it. I argue that the alleged separation of the social issue of "scope of responsibility" from the objective question of scientific causality is illusory. "Scientific causality" also plays an essential social role in the legal setting.

Omissions and Causalism∗

Omissions are puzzling, so puzzling that people tend to say puzzling things about them and give up otherwise attractive philosophical theories in order to accommodate them.1 In this paper I suggest that omissions make trouble—serious trouble, and trouble of a new, sui generis kind—for “causalism,” the standard view or family of views of agency. In particular, I am interested in causalism as an ...

Acts and omissions revisited.