An Analysis of Actual Causation
An Analysis of Actual Causation
Mario Günther and Holger Andreas
This work was presented at the New Zealand Association for Philosophers Conference 2019, an ANU Seminar, and Bayesian Epistemology: Perspectives and Challenges and ECAP10: 10th European Congress of Analytic Philosophy
We analyse causation between token events. Here is the gist of the analysis: an event c is a cause of another event e just in case both events occur, and -- after taking out the information whether or not e occurs -- e will occur if c does. We will show that the analysis successfully captures a wide range of causal scenarios, including overdetermination, preemption, switches, and two scenarios of double prevention. This set of scenarios troubles counterfactual accounts of actual causation. Even sophisticated counterfactual accounts still fail to deal with all of its members. And they fail for a principled reason: to solve overdetermination and preemption, they rely on a strategy which gives the wrong results for switches and a scenario of double prevention. Our analysis, by contrast, is not susceptible to this principled problem.