Proximate causes

Proximate causes are especially relevant in juridical debates and legal issues, but since I am a philosopher and not a jurist and since this is a philosophical blog, I’ll discuss the subject from a philosophical point of view. But what is a proximate cause? For understanding this one must see that there is seldom an immediate causal relation between two events when one causes the other, so between cause and effect. It rarely happens that I suddenly see a ball when I am making a stroll and I just kick it. Usually, it is so that I am playing an official or unofficial match – street football! – and my kicking the ball follows from my decision to gather for a kickabout with friends and this makes in fact that I kick the ball when I can. In practice, the situation is often more complicated. There is a chain of intermediate causes between what we can call the ultimate cause and the event we want to explain so the effect. Then the proximate cause is the last intermediate cause nearest to the event (effect) in this causal chain (or it is the only intermediate cause if there is only one). This way:

Ultimate cause > intermediate cause(s) > … > proximate cause > event

Often the causal chain is even more complicated but this simple scheme makes clear what we mean when we talk about the proximate cause.
On the face of it, one might think that only the ultimate cause, like the decision to play a game of football with friends, is important and that the rest follows, including the proximate cause. Here I’ll focus on the proximate cause, but what I am going to say is in fact also relevant for the other intermediate causes. However, by playing down the relevance of the proximate cause (and other intermediate causes) one commits the fallacy of mistaking the relevance of proximate causation, or, in the words of David Kyle Johnson in his article about this fallacy: “One mistakes the relevance of proximate causation when one thinks the fact that something is a proximate cause makes it irrelevant to the story of how the event in question happened (or whether or not it would have happened).” (p. 182) Johnson makes this clear by analysing the slogan “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people”. Of course, it is so that a gun must be used by a person to shoot someone if not in a mass shooting, but, so Johnson – and I fully agree –, it doesn’t follow that guns don’t play an important causal role in shootings, “and so it doesn’t follow that regulating guns wouldn’t do anything to reduce the frequency of mass shootings” and other shootings in which guns are used, as I want to add. Although guns are proximate causes, they do make shooting other people, esp. en masse, much easier. So, it would make sense to make them harder to attain. Without guns, committing mass shootings would be by far more difficult, and the idea that guns are only proximate causes when people are shot by other people is irrelevant to the question whether guns should be made more difficult to attain: Guns are one of the causes in the causal chain. (ibid.)
A related mistake is to exaggerate the importance of something being a proximate cause: A proximate cause doesn’t erase the role of the ultimate cause. It is the reverse of the fallacy that proximate causes are irrelevant. The fallacy of exaggerating the proximate cause is committed, for instance, by those who try to deny responsibility for their actions. To take again an example from Johnson (id., p. 183): “Suppose you have a rich uncle with cancer in the hospital on life support and that you pull the plug so as to get the inheritance you were promised.” Then you cannot rightfully claim that you weren’t responsible for your uncle’s death but that the cancer killed him: “[A]lthough the cancer was the most proximate cause, you played an important causal role in this death.” Yet this line of reasoning often happens in daily life.
The question which event caused the effect, the ultimate cause or the proximate cause (or another intermediate cause), presents a false dilemma. Real life situations are usually more complicated and not as straightforward as that. Ignoring or denying this is an oversimplification, but that is a fallacy that I’ll discuss maybe in another blog.

Source
This blog heavily leans on David Kyle Johnson, “Mistaking the Relevance of Proximate Causation”, in Arp, Robert; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019; pp. 181-184.
See also “Proximate and ultimate causation” and “Proximate cause” in Wikipedia.