Causal Contribution

Kaiserman, Alex

doi:10.1093/arisoc/aow013

Cited by 25 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Some people deny that there is any sense to be made of the notion of degrees of causal contribution-Zimmerman himself, for example, explicitly says that causal contribution is ''a factor which admits of no degrees'' (Zimmerman 1985a: 117). I have sought to challenge this contention in previous work by articulating a novel account of degrees of causal contribution (Kaiserman 2016). The account takes as its starting point the familiar idea that causes are non-redundant members of sets of events that were jointly sufficient, in the circumstances, for their effects.…”

Section: The Dimensions Of Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But just as multiple authors can contribute to different extents to the authoring of a book, so too can multiple causes contribute to different extents to the causing of an effect, by contributing to different extents to making the plurality as a whole jointly sufficient for the effect. In Kaiserman (2016) I cash this out in probabilistic terms to arrive at a precise measure of one event's degree of contribution to a causing of some effect. But the details won't be necessary for our purposes-the important point is just that we can make sense of the idea of an action's degree of contribution to bringing a certain outcome about, and this is plausibly one of the factors that go into determining an agent's degree of responsibility for that outcome.…”

Section: The Dimensions Of Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Responsibility and the ‘Pie Fallacy’

Kaiserman¹

2021

Philos Stud

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Much of our ordinary thought and talk about responsibility exhibits what I call the ‘pie fallacy’—the fallacy of thinking that there is a fixed amount of responsibility for every outcome, to be distributed among all those, if any, who are responsible for it. The pie fallacy is a fallacy, I argue, because how responsible an agent is for some outcome is fully grounded in facts about the agent, the outcome and the relationships between them; it does not depend, in particular, on how responsible anyone else is for that same outcome. In this paper, I explore how the pie fallacy can arise by considering several different kinds of case in which two or more agents are responsible for the same outcome. I’ll end with some brief remarks on the potential consequences of my arguments for how to think about responsibility in war.

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Section: The Dimensions Of Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Dimensions Of Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsibility and the ‘Pie Fallacy’

Kaiserman¹

2021

Philos Stud

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“…To illustrate, consider the following case from Kaiserman (): Committee: D 1 , D 2 , D 3 and D 4 are the members of an executive committee of a manufacturing company. Every committee member has one vote each, except D 1 , the chair of the committee, who has two votes.…”

Section: Production Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In light of this, Kaiserman () proposes (what amounts to) a probabilistic extension of δ . Let D = 1 if the driver is drunk and 0 otherwise, R = 1 if the rainstorm occurs and 0 otherwise and C = 1 if the car crash occurs and 0 otherwise.…”

Section: Production Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Committee , for example, D 2 's vote contributes to two causings of the injury, the causing by [ V 1 = 1, V 2 = 1] and the causing by [ V 2 = 1, V 3 = 1, V 4 = 1]. Assuming for the sake of argument that each committee member has a probability of 0.5 of voting in favour of the motion, regardless of the actions of the others, Kaiserman (: 392) shows that V 2 contributes to degree 0.42 to the first causing and to degree ⅓ to the second. In just the same way that a plank of wood at the intersection of two wooden fences of different lengths can contribute to different degrees to two different ‘surroundings’ of the very same tree, a cause may contribute to different degrees to two different causings of the very same effect.…”

Section: Production Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘More of a Cause’: Recent Work on Degrees of Causation and Responsibility

Kaiserman

2018

Philosophy Compass

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It is often natural to compare two events by describing one as ‘more of a cause’ of some effect than the other. But what do such comparisons amount to, exactly? This paper aims to provide a guided tour of the recent literature on ‘degrees of causation’. Section 2 looks at what I call ‘dependence measures’, which arise from thinking of causes as difference‐makers. Section 3 looks at what I call ‘production measures’, which arise from thinking of causes as jointly sufficient for their effects. Finally, section 4 examines the important question of whether there is any sense in which an agent is more responsible for an outcome in virtue of her action being more of a cause of it. I describe a puzzle that emerges from this question, and explore various strategies for resolving it.

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Graded causation and moral responsibility

Hoffmann-Kolss,

Rolffs

2024

Erkenn

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Theories of graded causation attract growing attention in the philosophical debate on causation. An important field of application is the controversial relationship between causation and moral responsibility. However, it is still unclear how exactly the notion of graded causation should be understood in the context of moral responsibility. One question is whether we should endorse a proportionality principle, according to which the degree of an agent’s moral responsibility is proportionate to their degree of causal contribution. A second question is whether a theory of graded causation should measure closeness to necessity or closeness to sufficiency. In this paper, we argue that we should indeed endorse a proportionality principle and that this principle supports a notion of graded causation relying on closeness to sufficiency rather than closeness to necessity. Furthermore, we argue that this insight helps to provide a plausible analysis of the so-called ‘Moral Difference Puzzle’ recently described by Bernstein.

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Causal Contribution

Cited by 25 publications

References 8 publications

Responsibility and the ‘Pie Fallacy’

Responsibility and the ‘Pie Fallacy’

‘More of a Cause’: Recent Work on Degrees of Causation and Responsibility

Graded causation and moral responsibility

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