Cause and norm

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 106, Issue 11, 2009, Pages 587-612

  Hitchcock, Christopher ^a   Knobe, Joshua ^b  

^a CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

^b YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77249096346     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil20091061128     Document Type: Review

References (44)

1. To name just a few: Donald Davidson, "Causal Relations," in Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford, 1980), pp. 149-62
2. Phil Dowe, Physical Causation (New York: Cambridge, 2000)
3. Ellery Eells, Probabilistic Causality (New York: Cambridge, 1991), chapter 6
4. Joseph Halpern and Judea Pearl, "Causes and Explanations: A Structural-model Approach - Part I: Causes," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, LVI (2005): 843-87
5. Christopher Hitchcock, "The Intransitivity of Causation Revealed in Equations and Graphs," this JOURNAL, XCVIII, 6 (June 2001): 273-99
6. "Prevention, Preemption, and the Principle of Sufficient Reason," Philosophkai Review, CXVI (2007): 495-532
7. David K. Lewis, "Causation," this JOURNAL, LXX, 17 (October 11, 1973): 556-67
8. "Causation as Influence," this JOURNAL, XCVII, 4 (April 2000): 182-97
9. Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (New York: Cambridge, 2000), chapter 10
10. Michael Tooley, Causation: A Realist Approach (New York: Oxford, 1987)
11. James Woodward, Making Things Happen (New York: Oxford, 2003), chapter 2
12. Stephen Yablo, "De Facto Dependence," this JOURNAL, XCIX, 3 (March 2002): 130-48
13. See also the many essays in John Collins, Ned Hall, and L.A. Paul, eds. Causation and Counterfactuals (Cambridge: MIT, 2004)
14. and Dowe and Paul Noordhof, eds., Cause and Chance (New York: Routledge, 2004)
15. See Hitchcock, "Three Concepts of Causation," Philosophy Compass, II (2007): 508-16 (http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/phco/2/3)
16. and "Prevention, Preemption, and the Principle of Sufficient Reason," for further discussion of this point
17. Lewis, Postscript E to "Causation," in his Philosophical Papers: Volume 11, pp. 193-213
18. Halpern and Pearl, "Causes and Explanations."
19. Hall, "Structural Equations and Causation," Philosophical Studies, CXXXII (2007): 109-36
20. Hitchcock, "Prevention, Preemption, and the Principle of Sufficient Reason."
21. For example, Nancy Cartwright, "Causal Laws and Effective Strategies," Noûs, XIII (1979): 419-37
22. Woodward, Making Things Happen
23. Our account has affinities with the proposal - championed by Guido Calabresi in The Costs of Accidents (New Haven: Yale, 1970) - that the agent who caused some harmful outcome is the one who could have avoided the outcome with the least cost. Under this concept of causation, it is argued, the practice of holding those who cause bad outcomes responsible for those outcomes will maximize social utility; those who can avoid bad outcomes most cheaply will be provided with an incentive for paying those costs, and in this way, the cost to the society as a whole is minimized. As we shall see in section IX below, however, our evaluative criteria have nothing to do with economic cost
24. See, for example, H.L.A. Hart and T. Honoré, Causation in the Law, Second Edition (New York: Oxford, 1985), especially pp. 32-41
25. Mill, A System of Logic, Volume I, Fourth Edition (London: J.W. Parker and Son, 1856), pp. 360-61
26. Lewis, "Causation," cited from Philosophical Papers, p. 162
27. Hall, "Two Concepts of Causation," in Collins, Hall, and Paul, eds., p. 228
28. See Hitchcock, "Three Concepts of Causation," for further discussion
29. J. Knobe and B. Fraser, "Causal Judgment and Moral Judgment Two Experiments," in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality (Cambridge: MIT, 2008), pp. 441-48. Subjects were presented with one of the two statements, and were asked to rate the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with it on a 7-point scale, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Those who were given the statement 'Professor Smith caused the problem' gave an average rating of 5.2, while those who were given the statement 'The administrative assistant caused the problem' gave an average rating of 2.8. This difference was statistically significant (p < .001)
30. See, for example: Ruth Byrne, "Mental Models and Counterfactual Thoughts about What Might Have Been," Trends in Cognitive Science, VI (2002): 426-31
31. Daniel Kahneman and Dale Miller, "Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives," Psychological Review, LXXX (1986): 136-53
32. Kahneman and Amos Tversky, "The Simulation Heuristic," in Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Tversky, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (New York: Cambridge, 1982), pp. 201-10
33. David R. Mandel, Denis J. Hilton, and Patrizia Catellani, eds., The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking (New York: Routledge, 2005)
34. N.J. Roese, "Counterfactual Thinking," Psychological Bulletin, CXXI (1997): 133-48
35. Roese, Psychological Bulletin op. cit
36. D. Read, "Deteminants of Relative Mutability," unpublished manuscript
37. Kahneman and Tversky, "Deteminants of Relative Mutability," op. cit
38. This view is proposed by Julia Driver, "Attributions of Causation and Moral Responsibility," in Sinnott-Armstrong, ed
39. As proposed by Mark Alicke, "Culpable Causation," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, LXIII (1992): 368-78
40. Moritz Schlick, The Problems of Ethics, translated by D. Rynin (New York: Prentice Hall, 1939)
41. See, for example, P.F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," Proceedings of the British Academy, XLVIII (1962): 1-25
42. but see also M. Vargas, "Moral Influence, Moral Responsibility" in Nick Trakakis and Daniel Cohen, eds., Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming), for a reply to Strawson
43. F. Cushman, Knobe, and Sinnott-Armstrong, "Moral Appraisals Affect Doing/Allowing Judgments," Cognition, CVIII (2008): 281-89
44. Knobe, "Cognitive Processes Shaped by the Impulse to Blame," Brooklyn Law Review, LXXI (2005): 929-37. Thirty-five subjects were given each version of the vignette, and then asked to rank their level of agreement with the causal claim on a scale from zero to six. The mean rating for Lauren was 3.34, for Jane 0.37 (p < .001)