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

Abstract

Livengood and Sytsma (2020) challenge the Compositionality Constraint of Actual Causation (CCAC), according to which each intermediary of a causal chain is an effect of its predecessor and a cause of its successor link. In several studies, they find support for their hypothesis that the CCAC is not in accordance with ordinary causal attributions of laypeople. We argue that there are three interrelated problems in their studies’ design that we call the Causality-Responsibility Confusion (CRC), the Intermediary-Ontology Confusion (IOC), and the Cause-End Questioning (CEQ). Avoiding the CRC, the IOC, and the CEQ leads to strong empirical support for the CCAC.