Starting off our colloquium series, professor Carolina Sartorio from Rutgers University, will be here on Friday, September 8, to give her talk at 3:00pm. Location TBD.
Talk Title: From Responsibility to Causation: The Intransitivity of Causation as a Case Study.
Abstract: Can we infer claims about causation from claims about moral responsibility? On the face of it, this would seem to get things backwards, for we typically proceed in the opposite way: we establish, first, that agents causally contributed to certain outcomes, together with the fact that they met some other conditions that are required for responsibility, and we conclude that those agents are morally responsible for the outcomes. However, in this paper I argue that there are special conditions under which inferences from responsibility to causation are warranted. My argument focuses on the debate over the transitivity of causation. I argue that we can learn that causation is not transitive by focusing on claims about responsibility (plus claims about the connection between responsibility and causation). This is because, in the scenarios I focus on, the judgments about responsibility (and about the connection between responsibility and causation) are more entrenched than the relevant causal claims. Thus, we can learn about the causal concept that underlies our concept of responsibility by thinking about what those responsibility judgments entail about causation.
Originally published at philosophy.nd.edu.