Causation in action

Taken by me at the Strassenindustriemuseum-in Ennepetal, Germany

We have seen in my blog last week that causation is not only in the mind, as Hume thought, but that it is also something real. Moreover, according to Hume, causation requires repeated observations of correlations among events. This would exclude the possibility of causes that occur only once. However, we have seen that the Belgian psychologist Michotte argued that we don’t need to see a repeated occurrence of a connection between two events to conclude that this connection is causal. Often we infer that there is a causal connection between two events at their first occurrence together – rightly or wrongly.
Now I want to discuss some known cases from action philosophy that illustrate that causation is often not so simple as that, and certainly not so simply as Hume thought.

A) The nervous climber
A climber wants to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope. He knows that by loosening his hold on the rope he can rid himself of the weight and danger. This idea unnerves him so much as to cause him to loosen his hold, though he didn’t choose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally. (Davidson¸ Essays on Actions and Events, p. 79. I have discussed this case also in my blog “Philosophical puzzles”)
We can see here a causal connection between the climber’s nervousness and the fall of the other climber, although it’s a single case. Besides that it is unethical to repeat the case to see whether there really exists a causal connection, in fact it is impossible to repeat it. Each time the circumstances will be different, albeit only because the falling man will be dead. Moreover, what is actually the cause and what is the effect in this case? What is the “causal path”? According to Davidson, we can say only that the climber caused the fall of the co-climber if what the climber believed and wanted to do on the one hand and the fall of the co-climber on the other hand were causally related “in the right way”, and that is apparently not the case. It’s not that the climber made the man fall, but something within the climber (his nervousness) did, since he didn’t have himself under control. The causal path is important when we try to answer the question whether or not the climber made the man fall intentionally and so whether or not he was responsible for the fall of the man.

B) The wild pigs
A man tries to kill someone by shooting at him. The killer misses his victim by a mile, but the shot stampedes a herd of wild pigs that tramples the intended victim to death. (Davidson¸ Essays on Actions and Events, p. 79; originally from Bennett).
While in the case of the nervous climber, there was a direct connection between the climber and his victim , since both were connected by a rope and the climber loosened his hold on the rope, such a direct connection is lacking between the shooter and his intended victim. It was not the shooter who killed the victim but the herd did. Or did he, nevertheless? For it was the shooter who caused the stampede so that the herd killed the victim, albeit unintentionally this way. Although the effect is known, the cause depends on your point of view. Also this case cannot be repeated. The causal connection is intrinsically one-time, for one cannot repeat intentionally what has been unintentionally done. Also now the analysis is important, since the responsibility of the shooter for the death of the victim is at stake. Was the shooter guilty, responsible or liable for the death of the victim and to what extent? Was it a case of murder or was it an attempt to murder?

C) Of B's and Bees
Fred is taking a machine-readable multiple-choice test. His strategy is to circle on the question sheet the identifying letters next to the answers that he feels certain are correct and then, after all such circling is completed, to fill in the corresponding spaces on his answer sheet. Then he will take up the more difficult questions. An hour has elapsed, and Fred is reading the 45th question. He is confident that the answer is ‘bee’, which word appears next to the letter ‘a’ on his question sheet. However, as a result of an understandable momentary confusion, he circles the letter ‘b’. As luck would have it, ‘b’ is the correct answer. Later, when filling in the answer sheet, Fred looks at the circled ‘b’ under question 45 and fills in the space under ‘b’ on his answer sheet – intending thereby to provide the right answer. (Mele, Irrationality, p. 56).
In this example, Fred’s filling in ‘b’ on his answer sheet caused that he gave the right answer to question 45. Or did his confusion do? For Fred had no reason to do so, for he made a mistake. A mistake made him fill in the answer sheet in the right way, so actually in the wrong way, for filling in ‘b’ was not what Fred intended. What actually is the cause that made Fred fill in the answer sheet the way he did? Again we have a case of a one-time cause, for mistakes cannot be repeated as mistakes, for, again, one cannot repeat intentionally what has been unintentionally done.

Much more can be said about cases like these, but anyway they illustrate that one-time causes can exist. Moreover, they illustrate that causation need not be direct, and they attack Hume’s view that cause and effect are contiguous (case B) and that there is a necessary connection between them (A, C). However, I leave this analysis to the reader. Especially, the cases illustrate how intentions can cause their results in an indirect deviant way: Either because the causal connection between the antecedent mental events and the initiation of behaviour is deviant (antecedental deviance); or because the consequences of the activity once begun are not as expected (consequential deviance); or because the aetiology of (some element of) the plan component of an intention is deviant (tertiary deviance). These deviances question also the correctness of Hume’s elements of causation discussed in my blog “Humean causation”.

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Source of the case descriptions and of some of the conclusions the website “Some puzzles about action”. See also the sources in the text.