Answers at Gunpoint: On Livengood and Sytsma’s Revolver Case

Abstract

Jonathan Livengood and Justin Sytsma have published a series of studies on “Actual Causation and Compositionality,” in which they investigate causal attributions of laypeople. We use one of their vignettes to follow up on their research. Our findings cast doubt on their conclusion that ordinary causal attributions tend to violate the compositionality constraint if one looks at cases in which someone is responsible for an effect by way of an intermediary that does not share in the responsibility.

Poisoned Babies, Shot Fathers, and Ruined Experiments: Experimental Evidence in Favor of the Compositionality Constraint of Actual Causation

“…There is no statement in L&S (2020) expressing that a link n of a causal chain is a cause for the respective next link if the link is not the end of the chain. However, as Bauer and Romann (2022) showed for the revolver vignette, a more detailed causal chain that includes more intermediaries leads to a much higher agreement with statements stating that link n is a cause for link (regardless of whether link is the end of the chain or not).…”

Experimental Metaphysics: Causation

“…The study of causation involves many cases and complex structures, and it affects many areas of philosophy. So, experimental philosophers of causation are now exploring many of these issue like compositionality (Bauer andRomann 2022, Livengood andSytsma 2020), some applied issues for causal judgment like the exclusion problem in philosophy of mind (Blanchard et al 2021), and some concepts that are thought to affect causal cognition like sensitivity (Blanchard et al 2018, and they are expanding this work to better understand the relationship between causal judgment and moral judgment (Engelmann and Waldmann 2022). Experimental philosophers are also using new methods like corpus analysis (Sytsma et al 2019), implicit causality measurements (Niemi et al 2020), and memory techniques (Henne et al 2017) to investigate these issues.…”