Abstract
The paper investigates how actual cause may be treated in ‘seeing to it that’ (‘stit’) logics, that is, determining when the actions of a particular agent, or a particular set of agents collectively, can be said to be the cause of a given outcome in given circumstances. There are two complementary problems: (1) the outcome is brought about by the actions of some set of agents and the task is to identify which of these agents are essential to that bringing about, and (2) the outcome depends partly on chance and the task is to identify which agents could have acted differently and thereby ensured a different outcome. The final part of the paper discusses briefly the need to account for causal and other dependences between the actions of agents, and how that might be done without abandoning the ‘stit’ framework altogether.
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Sergot, M. (2022). Actual Cause and Chancy Causation in Stit: A Preliminary Account. In: McNamara, P., Jones, A.J.I., Brown, M.A. (eds) Agency, Norms, Inquiry, and Artifacts: Essays in Honor of Risto Hilpinen. Synthese Library, vol 454. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90749-5_2
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