Abstract
I present and develop the view that omissions are de re possibilities of actual events. Omissions do not literally fail to occur; rather, they possibly occur. An omission is a tripartite metaphysical entity composed of an actual event, a possible event, and a contextually specified counterpart relation between them. This view resolves ontological, causal, and semantic puzzles about omissions, and also accounts for important data about moral responsibility for outcomes resulting from omissions.
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Notes
For example, that of Dowe (2000).
Terminological note: here I use “absence” to mean anything that doesn’t occur, and “omission” to mean a causally salient event. In this usage, omissions are a privileged subclass of absences distinguished by causal salience. I discuss this distinction at length further below.
For a view that argues in favor of disjunctive causes, see Sartorio (2006).
For simplicity, I am assuming that events are the causal relata.
A natural question arises: why not just use possible worlds without counterpart theory? Several reasons, in my view: first, counterpart theory provides a more precise tool with which to model similarity between events, since it is already made to model similarity between persons and objects. Second, counterpart theory provides a richer resolution to ATTACHMENT: the counterpart relation attaches possible events to actual ones via counterparthood. (More on this below.) Without it, nearness of worlds must do all the work. Third, counterpart theory avoids the problem of identity holding between two very different events (for example, Barack Obama’s speech and an airplane safety check.) Fourth, I agree with (Wasserman (MS)) that there are independent reasons for applying a counterpart-theoretic treatment to events.
Here I diverge from the traditional Lewisian framework in which only objects and persons have counterparts.
Like Lewis on objects and persons, I take counterparthood to be asymmetric and intransitive: if a is an event-counterpart of b, b is not necessarily an event-counterpart of a. And if a is an event-counterpart of b, and b is a counterpart of c, a is not necessarily an event-counterpart of c.
In cases where there is not one clear time or place where the omitted event was to occur, I take the actual relatum to be disjunctive, e.g., a safety check at location A on the tarmac OR at location B on the tarmac. This result is superior to the Disjunctive Event Strategy because it is much less problematic to hold that disjuncts are causally salient than to hold that they are causes.
Methodological note: I do not take there to be a meaningful linguistic distinction between events, persons, and objects in causal contexts. “The technician” is shorthand for “The event in which the technician participated during a particular period of time.” I.e., causal claims involving persons and objects are shorthand for causal claims involving events.
Thanks to Bernard Kobes for drawing attention to this view.
Schaffer follows Davidson (1967) in applying first-order predicate logic to events as well as objects.
Here I follow Lewis’ (1968) semantics for counterpart theory, where Wx: x is a world, lxy: x is in world y, @x: x is actual, and Cxy: x is a counterpart of y.
The way I am using the term, only omissions are causally salient. I discuss causal salience at length in 3.4.
Beebee (2004) argues for such a view. I discuss this view in more detail below.
It might fall out of some counterfactual theories that de re modal properties are causal. For example, there being something that is necessarily the cat on the mat will have the same counterfactual consequences as there being a cat on the mat. I don’t take this to imply that objects or events can have the causal powers that genuine causation by omission needs. Thanks to Daniel Nolan for this point.
But the absential reading is true, since there is a distant possible world where Abraham Lincoln performs the safety check.
I assume Lewis’ (Lewis 1979) similarity metric over possible worlds, which prizes large regions of spatiotemporal match as placing worlds close together in modal space. Though there are problems for this account, I will not concern myself with them here.
For more on this topic, see my “Omission Impossible” (MS).
Thanks to David Boonin, Carolina Sartorio, and Justin Weinberg for pressing me on this point.
Thanks to Owen Flanagan for this way of formulating the point.
Thanks to Alex Guerrero for this way of framing it.
This case is adapted from Fischer and Ravizza (1998).
This example is adapted from Clarke (1994). Thanks to Stephen Kearns for drawing my attention to it.
Thanks to Rachael Briggs for this case.
Beebee (2004, p. 26).
One might also have the opposite intuition that Nosy Neighbor world is closer than Negligent Neighbor world. Either way, my view holds that both worlds are equally close to actuality. Thanks to Elizabeth Harman for this point.
See Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972).
Here I follow Unger (1995) as interpreting Singer’s “ought” as one that means “We must do it” rather than “It would be better to do it than not to do it.”
By “epistemic ability,” I mean that an agent knows about the problem and knows how to solve it.
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Acknowledgments
This paper has benefitted enormously from comments by Mark Heller, Carolina Sartorio, Xiaofei Liu, Rachael Briggs, and Stephen Kearns. I also thank Mark Balaguer, Randy Clarke, Owen Flanagan, Daniel Nolan, Alex Rosenberg, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for extensive conversation and feedback, and audiences at the Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference, Australian National University, Melbourne University, 2012 Pacific APA, Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, Triangle Area Philosophy Symposium, Arizona State University, Boise State University, and Cal State-Los Angeles.
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Bernstein, S. Omissions as possibilities. Philos Stud 167, 1–23 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0229-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0229-0