Causation is contested only at the edges
A paper on Godfrey-Smith's proposal to treat causation as an essentially contested concept. The boundary really is blurry, but the ordinary use is stable enough that courts agree on most of it, which is not how a contested concept behaves.
Written for a PHL233 paper assignment, submitted March 17, 2024. The assignment set a passage and asked two questions in 500 words: what is the author’s argument, and what is a reasonable objection to it. Rewritten here from the original, with the citations turned into inline links and a looser register; the argument is unchanged, and the paper as submitted is available as a PDF. The passage is Godfrey-Smith, “Causal Pluralism”, from “I suggest that something like this analysis might be applied to the case of causation” to “of a shared purpose behind diverse uses prevent a fragmentation into distinct concepts.” The copy I worked from is here.
Godfrey-Smith proposes that we treat causation as an essentially contested concept in Gallie’s sense. Gallie’s examples are appraisive: a work of art, a winner. They are internally complex, open-ended, and argued over permanently by reasonable people because the achievement they accredit keeps being modified.
The case for putting causation in that class is that its boundaries are indistinct, that it is held together by a set of exemplars sharing a purpose rather than by a definition, and that it is bound up with appraising what people do. A passer-by watches a child drown. Did he cause the death?
The boundary really is blurry
I agree about the boundaries. The air-traffic controller who fails to act, which is causation by prevention, and the bystander at the water, which is causation by omission, both sit outside anything a definition cleanly settles. The bystander case is the sharper one, since in most common-law jurisdictions watching a child drown is not a crime. Liability needs a special relationship: a guardian, or someone who has taken on responsibility for the child’s safety. Without that connection he is probably not responsible at all.
I also agree that causation is tied to appraisal, and legal settings are where that is most visible. Being judged causally connected to an event is how responsibility gets attached to a person.
What the classification costs
What I doubt is that calling causation essentially contested helps us understand it. Gallie’s category absorbs several features of causation without simplifying any of them, and what we get back is a conceptual black box.
The disanalogy is in the ordinary cases. Gallie’s contested concepts, art and achievement among them, are human creations submitted for human appraisal. Causation is a human attempt to attribute contribution, and when we say A caused B in the ordinary consensual way, A really did act on B, either physically or along a chain of difference-making. That use is well behaved and well defined, and it produces almost no argument. The hard cases are a thin slice. If they were not, courts could not run mostly on consensus with only a few genuinely difficult judgments, which is what they do.
Art moved and causation did not
The other difference is historical. The ordinary uses of causation have survived centuries more or less intact. Court judgments from ancient Greece about who is answerable for what still read as sensible. Set that against the definition of art, which has moved constantly and fast: most modern work would not be recognized as art by a Renaissance painter at all. A concept whose contested core keeps being remade behaves nothing like one whose central use a Greek juror would still follow.
What the corner cases are evidence of
Causation is one of the main instruments people use to assign contribution, and it works. Label it essentially contested and the consensus underneath most court judgments becomes hard to explain, since permanent reasonable disagreement is exactly what the label predicts.
So causation has contested regions, and it does not belong in the category. Its history, its ordinary use, and the shape of the arguments about it all point the other way. Reading the corner cases as the nature of the whole concept gives up on explaining the part that already works, which is most of it.
How the idea was born
My first reaction was agreement. The boundary really is vague: the air-traffic controller who fails to act, the bystander at the water, neither of them settled by any definition. Calling causation essentially contested looked promising.
The doubt came from asking what the label buys. It absorbs the features of causation without simplifying any of them, and Gallie’s own examples are not like this one. Art and achievement are human creations submitted for appraisal. Causation is an attempt to attribute contribution, and its ordinary use produces almost no argument at all.
What settled it for me is the courtroom. Courts run mostly on consensus, and permanent reasonable disagreement is exactly what the label predicts. The historical check pointed the same way: judgments from ancient Greece about who is answerable still read as sensible, while art has moved far enough that a Renaissance painter would not recognize most of it.
I said all of that to a friend the night before the paper was due, before writing any of it down. The second half of the paper is that conversation, more or less.