Udoka Omenukor

25308365

April 29th, 2010

Philosophy of Causation

Non-existent Events cannot be Causes

As a child, I was blamed for a persistent ant problem in our

house. It was my job to wash the dishes every night, and sometimes I

didn’t want to do them. Predictably, the ants would arrive and my

mother would blame me. “It is your fault we have this ant problem!”

“But why?” I’d ask and she’d reply “Because you failed to do the

dishes.”

This scenario is referred to as omission causation. Omission

causation states that the failure of event C happening counts as a

cause for an event E happening. The case of causation is very tricky

because it makes sense some times but other times, it doesn’t make

sense. For example, my failure to do the dishes causing an ant

problem makes sense. However, a random stranger in Austria’s failure

to do my dishes causing an ant problem does not make sense. When it

comes to omission causation, one must either agree with it completely

or reject it completely. Either way, one will resign to a theory of

causation that doesn’t make complete sense at first glance.

INTRODUCTION

I propose that omission causation actually doesn’t make sense at

all. One can be blamed for something happening due to their failure to

act, however, it doesn’t make sense to say they are the cause. For

example, it makes sense to blame me for the ant problem in my house

because I did not wash the dishes. However, I am not the cause of the

ant problem. The cause of the ant problem is the smell of food residue

on the dirty dishes. I am no more the cause of the ant problem than

my next-door neighbor. The true causation for the ant problem was an

event that actually occurred. Causation can only involve positive

events.

Furthermore, negative events cannot be involved in causation

because negative events cannot produce anything. For example, my

lack of washing dishes doesn’t produce the ants. Negative events can

only lead to other negative events. For example, a popular scenario is

the gardener scenario. The gardener fails to water the plants and the

plants die. Some people would say the gardener caused the plants to

die. However, when I analyze what it means for the plants to die, I

come to the conclusion that death is an absence of cell activity. This

means that the gardener’s failure to act lead to another negative event
(the act of dying). The event of not watering the plants is not

causation. Instead, it is just a chain of non-events. The plants don’t get

water, so the plants don’t get nutrients, so the cells don’t move. It is

only a matter of language that we say the plant is dead. Dead is the

term we use for the negative event of non-moving cells. It is the same

thing as any other non-occurring scenario. For example, if I don’t knock

down my cup, the cup does not break, there is no glass on the ground,

and no one cuts their toe. There is no causation involved, just a series

of non-events.

SCHAFFER Vs. DOWE

One of the first philosophers who bring up omission causation is

Schaffer who describes it using the terms “negative causation”. He

uses negative causation to support his theory that there does not need

to be physical connections between two things for one to be the cause

of the other. He gives good examples of situations that involve

negative causation. For example, the cause of someone getting scurvy

would be a lack of vitamin C. The cause of drowning would be a lack of

oxygen, which starves your cells. Schaffer says refuting this theory

would go against biological realities (like sicknesses), legal systems

and common sense. Dowe, who believes in physical connection and

processes in causation, refutes Schaffer’s theory. He claims that

negative causation is just quasi-causation. A quasi-causation is like a

fake causation. The negative event (the thing that didn’t happen) is

just a part of a causal process, according to Dowe. According to my

theory, this quasi-causation is also just a part of a process. The process

is not causal. It is just a chain of non-events (or negative events).

Schaffer says that denying his theory means one goes against other

ideas we use in our lives. However, legal processes don’t have much to

do with defining causation. They deal with obligations and moral

responsibility, which is different than causation. I also think common

sense will not have trouble viewing negative events as a series of

things that simply did not happen.

BEEBEE

Beebee also denies omission causation. Causation via an

absence does not exist. She wants to stay true to the idea that

causation is a relation between positive events just as I want to show

that causation is only involves positive events. She explains why

common sense thinks omission causation is true. First, she says the

following definition is used for omission causation:

“The non-occurrence of an event of type A caused event b if and only

if, had an A-type event occurred, b would not have occurred.”

 However, this definition assumes that the non-event cause is a

necessary event for event b. She also claims that it does not work for

the gardener case. The gardener case is the case mentioned earlier

where the gardener fails to water the flowers and the flower die. This

definition works for the case if it is a local gardener, but the gardener

case in which we say Francisco in Germany fails to water the plants

causes them to die does not work under this definition.

The reason common sense doesn’t think Francisco is a cause is

because there is an abnormality factor that comes to mind. Since

Francisco never waters the plants, it would be abnormal for him to

water the plants. Because the action of him watering the plants would

be abnormal, it makes common sense that his failure to water the

flowers is not a cause of death. Also, the gardener has a legal duty to

fulfill. So, on the first day of his job, it would be abnormal for him to

water the plants, but since it is his duty, he is expected to. She

concludes that common sense only associates causation with a

negative event when something about it “sticks out”. For example, if a

drug company did not know about harsh side-effects from their drug

and the side-effects were unforeseeable, no one would say they

caused people injury. However, if the drug company knew about the

side-effects, then people might say they are the cause for people’s

injuries. The fact that the drug company may or may not know about
the side-effects is what sticks out and causes common sense to

associate causation with the negative event of the drug company not

putting warnings on the drug. The following is the logic common sense

uses:

“(II) The absence of an A-type event caused b if and only if

(i) b counterfactually depends on the absence: had an A-type event

occurred, b would not have occurred; and

(ii) the absence of an A-type event is either abnormal or violates some

moral, legal, epistemic or other norm.” (BeeBee, pg. 296)

This shows that common sense is not reliable because the

second condition is very subjective. What may be abnormal to one

person is not abnormal to another. Everyone has different views on

morality, legality, etc. One cannot rely on common sense to give a

truth statement about causation. In this case, she offers another

alternate definition of causation for common sense:

“(III) The absence of an A-type event caused b if and only if:

(i) if an A-type event had occurred, b would not have occurred; and

(ii) an A-type event occurs at a world that is reasonably close to the

actual world.” (BeeBee, pg. 298)

 This means that since the world where Francisco is watering the

flowers is so distant it does not count as a cause. However, Beebee

explains this wouldn’t work for common sense, either. Firstly, deciding

how close one world is to another is another subjective task. There’s no

objective way to decide which worlds are close enough and which

worlds are too far away. On top of that, what is too distant of a world

for one scenario may be close enough for another scenario. This is too

inconsistent and arbitrary. Secondly, if the world were to be one in

which the gardener is consistently late and irresponsible, common

sense would still blame him for the plants’ deaths. No matter how

frequently someone is negligent, their negligence would still be seen

as a cause. Beebee concludes that there is no objective way to

differentiate between negative events that are causes and negative

events that are not causes, even though common sense thinks there

is.

Common sense factors in things such as morality when it decides

what is a cause and what is not a cause. Sometimes, something that

common sense thinks is a cause is actually an explanation of the

cause. It fails to differentiate between causation and causal

explanation. Saying that “the plants died because the gardener forgot

to water them” explains the plants’ causal history. “Because” is a term

used to help describe causal history. This means you could also say
“The plants died because Francisco did not water them” since we are

not claiming causation, but describing what happened.

Beebee’s explanation for why omission causation may be

thought of as a real type of causation is because of common sense.

Shown above to be a faulty guide for assigning causation, there is no

reason to view omission causation as valid. For Beebee, common sense

seems to be the day to day thoughts and language people use in their

lives. Common sense is good for describing a causal process, but not

necessarily for deciding what the true cause is.

SARAH MCGRATH

McGrath is a proponent of omission causation. She believes that

common sense is right and disagrees with the idea that affirming to

omission causation means that you accept every negative event to be

a cause. She thinks she helps solve this dilemma with the idea of

normality.

“o causes e iff o occurs, e occurs, and either Co is a normal would-be

pre-

venter of e, or there is some event e* such that e* causes e, and Co is

normal would-be preventer of e*.” (McGrath, p. 142)

 This means an omission, o, causes an event e if and only if the

non-omission (the actual action) normally prevents e’s occurrence. Or

if there is another event that causes e and the non-omission normally

prevents that other event. For example, if Francisco, who normally

waters the plant, doesn’t water the plants and the plants die, a bug

that eats the plant will also die. McGrath would say Francisco caused

the bug to die, even though Francisco does not normally do anything

for the bug, particularly. In this case, the dead plant would be event e*

that causes event e, the bug dying. Watering the plant would be Co

and not watering the plant would be o.

McGrath states that a normality must be established before we

decide if an omission is a cause or not. This is very arbitrary – a

problem that Beebee has spoken out against. Deciding when

something is normal or how to determine when something is normal is

too arbitrary to consider it for causation.

CONCLUSION

Omission causation does not actually agree with common sense.

Bee bee’s analysis shows that common sense is mistaken and I believe

that when one looks at causation objectively, without bias of morality,

normality and other obligations, one’s common sense will no longer

agree with omission causation.

Only positive events can cause an event. When an omission

occurs (a negative event), it cannot produce a positive event. Since the

negative event is an action that is not occurring in the world, it cannot

create or cause anything to happen. When McGrath says that

Francisco’s failure to water the plant causes the plant to die, she is not

actually making a statement of causation. She is talking about one

negative event that leads to another negative event that we

linguistically refer to as death. When Schaffer says scurvy is caused by

a lack of vitamin C, he means that the negative event of a lack of

vitamin c leads to the negative event of cells not producing collagen. In

all examples of omission causation, the omission brings about only

another negative event. Beebee and Dowe would say that Schaffer

and McGrath are just describing a process. I propose, also, that the

process is not necessarily causal, but in the very least a sequence of

non-events.