Causation, absences, and the Prince of Wales
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Causation, absences, and the Prince of Wales Cei Maslen1
Received: 30 June 2014 / Accepted: 24 November 2015 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract In this paper, I defend a counterfactual approach to causation by absences from some recent criticisms due to Sartorio (New waves in metaphysics, 2010). Keywords
Causation · Lewis · Omissions
1 Introduction In her 2010 paper, Carolina Sartorio presents two new problems for a counterfactual approach to causation by absences. Counterfactual analyses of causation have been subject to much criticism over the past few decades, but these problems stand out as important new problems for two reasons. First, as Sartorio points out, most previous criticisms have only showed that a criterion of counterfactual dependence is not necessary for causation. Second, a counterfactual approach still seems to be the most promising available approach to causation by absences. Sartorio assumes, for the sake of argument, that causal facts are grounded in counterfactual dependence. She concentrates on the claim that counterfactual dependence is sufficient for causation, which she formulates as follows: (CC) If there is counterfactual dependence of the ordinary (non-backtracking) kind between C and E, and if C and E are fully “distinct” (e.g., they are not logically or mereologically related), then C is a cause of E. Note that the restrictions on backtracking and non-distinct events are from Lewis, and were intended to help him solve the traditional problems of distinguishing causes
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Cei Maslen [email protected] Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
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from effects, distinguishing causes from effects of a common cause, distinguishing causes from preempted alternatives, and distinguishing causal dependence from other counterfactual dependencies such as logical and mereological dependencies. Sartorio identifies two new problems for (CC) arising from an example about the Prince of Wales. Sartorio imagines that the Queen asks the Prince of Wales to water her delicate plant while she is away for the day. The Prince agrees, but instead of watering the plant he spends the afternoon eating some oaten biscuits. In fact, Sartorio specifies, “There are several things that the Prince did and failed to do that afternoon: he ate some oaten biscuits, he read the newspaper, he scratched his nose, he didn’t phone a friend, he didn’t watch TV, he didn’t water the Queen’s plant.” She supposes that the following counterfactual is true: (1) If the Prince of Wales hadn’t eaten the biscuits then he would have watered the plant. To help us to imagine how (1) could be true, she suggests that “the Prince keeps a list of possible things to do at different times on a given day, ranked by order of preference.” It follows from (1) and (CC) that the Prince of Wales’ eating the biscuits was one of the causes of the plant’s dying. But intuitively this isn’t right. As Sartorio says, we can imagine that “his eating the biscuits doesn’t result in his failing to wate
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