Abstract
Moore’s Mechanical Choices is ripe with interesting ideas. Here I’ll focus on a particularly intriguing one that intersects with some aspects of my own work. It’s the suggestion that causalism should be amended in a way that doesn’t require causation. At first, this suggestion may sound absurd: How can causalism survive without causation, of all things? But I think that Moore is actually right about the main suggestion. I don’t think he’s right for the right reasons, but he’s still right about the main idea. So, the aim of this paper is to explain how causalism can survive without causation, and how it may not.
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Notes
Moore uses “willings” but I’ll stick with “intentions,” which I think is a more neutral and less ambiguous term. (What are willings supposed to be: are they tryings, decidings, or something else altogether? It’s not fully clear. Mele raises these questions in his 2017: 72–3.).
Moreover, this isn’t just because of what Moore thinks about omissions (Moore thinks that, whereas causalism should be able to capture the type of agency involved in omitting to act, omissions are not the kinds of things that can be involved in causal relations). But it’s also for this reason, as I explain in Sect. 5 below.
Here I am paraphrasing Moore (see his p. 74 and 423).
Interestingly, Moore seems to implicitly recognize the existence of the earlier intention when he writes, about his Paralyzed Patriot case: “Intending to convey the information that he has (that the British are coming by boat), PP wills the movement of his paralyzed finger…” (pp. 422–3, my emphasis).
I discuss responsibility for non-causal consequences in Sartorio 2022.
I argue for this in more detail in Sartorio Forthcoming. See also Sartorio 2021.
It’s also an ordinary explanatory connection in the sense that it’s not teleological (or irreducibly teleological) in nature, in opposition to what some non-causalist views of agency say.
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Acknowledgements
I presented an earlier version of this paper at a symposium on Michael Moore’s book at Rutgers University in May 2022. Thanks to the organizers, Doug Husak and Alec Walen, and to Michael and the audience members for discussion. Thanks also to Alec for helpful editorial suggestions.
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Sartorio, C. Causalism Without Causation. Criminal Law, Philosophy 18, 185–199 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-023-09677-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-023-09677-5