On a familiar conception of the material world, some objects are fundamental and others derivative. The fundamental objects are the basic building blocks of physics, whether they be fundamental particles, strings, space and time, or what have you. The derivative objects are those the fundamental ones serve to construct: stars and snowflakes, trees and tables, molecules and mountains—all that stuff. My dissertation project is motivated by the thought that as it is with matter, so it is with causal relationships: causation has a dual nature; some causal relationships are fundamental, while others are derivative, constructed in part from their fundamental counterparts. But the picture I paint of the duality of causality is not the one you might expect. We are accustomed to thinking of the fundamental realm as the realm of microphysics, and while this may be the right way to think of matter, it won’t do as a way of understanding causation. I defend a conception of causation on which lower level causal relationships are sometimes constructed out of higher level causal relationships. Mental causation, for instance, often fits this pattern, with the causal relationship between a neurological event and a given behaviour depending on the causal relationship between the associated mental event and that behaviour.
My dissertation motivates and elaborates on this conception of causation, arguing that it points the way to a new theory of actual causation which improves on its predecessors, and resolves a number of adjacent problems along the way. In my dissertation I am only able to pursue a few of the developments promised by this way of thinking. Foremost among these are a new strategy for dealing with the exclusion problem, and new approaches to the cases of redundant causation, intransitivity, and counterfactually isomorphic but causally distinct structures that have plagued counterfactual theories of causation, though other issues are discussed besides. Much of my other research (some of which is detailed below) is devoted to consummating this project by exploring the way these ideas wend their way through other debates in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, but also in ethics, the philosophy of action and the philosophy of mind.
Building Low Level Causation out of High Level Causation. A paper about the relative fundamentality of high and low level causation. Though their monikers suggest otherwise, I argue that facts about low level causation are often grounded in facts about high level causation. When a decrease in interest rates causes an increase in spending, for instance, the low level physical realiser of the decrease also causes the ensuing increase, but does so because the decrease caused the increase. I show that allowing high level causation to ground its low level counterpart opens up new avenues for responding to the exclusion problem, entails the falsity of certain popular reductive theses about causation, and undercuts the motivation for thinking that causes must be proportional to their effects. [link]
Collective Actions, Individual Reasons and Responsibilities. A paper defending a causal account of individual reasons and responsibilities in cases of collective action. I make the case that individuals have reasons for/against contributing to collective actions, and are responsible for the outcomes of those actions when they do contribute, because individual contributions to collective actions cause those outcomes. I argue both that individual contributions are apt to cause these outcomes, and that the shortcomings of grounding individual reasons and responsibilities in such causal facts are overblown. [link]
Counterfactual Dependence Without Causation. A paper about the thesis that counterfactual dependence suffices for causation and its connection to interventionist accounts of token causal structure. I argue that just as there are noncausal, backtracking counterfactual dependences, there are likewise noncausal, downtracking counterfactual dependences. The existence of these latter dependences demonstrates that counterfactual dependence does not suffice for causation, even with all the usual qualifications in place. I argue that no analogue of these qualifications can be used to cordon off the problem I have identified, and thus that we ought give up on this cornerstone of counterfactual theories of token causal structure, such as interventionism. [link]
My Brain Did Make Me Do It, but Only Because My Mind Did. A paper about the worry that, since brains—not agents—are causally responsible for behaviours, we are neither free nor morally morally responsible. I argue that even if we accept the strong claims some scientists have made about the neurological causes of our behaviour, agent causation enjoys a certain priority over neurological causation, and show how this priority insulates free will and moral responsibility from the charge that, ‘your brain did it, not you’. [link]
Derivative Causation. A paper about how some causal relationships are built from others. I develop a theory specifying how this works, and argue that it has a number of surprising implications in metaphysics, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind. Among these are the result that high level causation does not, in general, work by way of 'downward' causation; the development of a new way of privileging special science explanations of certain phenomena over microphysical explanations of the same; and the development of a new way for nonphysicalists about consciousness to avoid epiphenomenalism. [link]
The Ground Confound. A paper arguing that even sophisticated probabilistic theories of causation count spurious correlations as causal. I argue that an analogue of common cause structures which instead involve a mix of causal and grounding relationships are capable of inducing spurious correlations, and show that the same techniques that have been used to deal with common cause confounding will not work for ‘the ground confound’. I close by showing how these structures problematise common cause principles and the closely related Causal Markov Condition, thereby revealing that a hypothesized happy coincidence between causal and correlation structures, which Judea Pearl has called ‘a gift from the gods’, is in fact a poisoned chalice. [Email for draft]
Wreaking Revenge on Dialetheism. A paper about the dialethic solution to the liar paradox. I devise a 'revenge' paradox for the dialetheist based on a liar-like sentence which leads to absurdity even in paraconsistent logics. This confronts the dialetheist with a trilemma: abandon the view that liar sentences are both true and false and thereby abandon their 'solution' to the liar paradox; deny the coherence of the key logical operator used in formulating my revenge sentence, thereby forcing the dialetheist into the same corner as their classical opponent insofar as they both have to deny the expressibility of certain intuitive notions on pain of triviality; or embrace trivialism—the view that every sentence is true. [Email for draft]
Keeping Causation Grounded. A paper raising some new problems for the causal modeling approach to actual causation One of these problems stems from cases in which there is no way of holding other variables fixed so as to reveal the dependence of the effect variable on the cause variable. The other from cases in which there is straightforward dependence of the value of one variable on the value of another, but no causal relationship between the two (and for which the models are counterfactually isomorphic to models of cases in which there is a causal relationship). I argue that these cases, together with standard cases of redundant causation, suggest a new way of theorising about actual causation on which the most fundamental causal relationships involve counterfactual dependences that are themselves fundamental, in a certain precise sense. [Draft available soon]
Difference Making and Moral Responsibility. A paper about the interaction of our judgements about moral responsibility with the principle that causes are difference makers. I argue that the latter principle undergenerates causes in certain structures familiar from the literature on the intransitivity of causation. I then show how this brings the principle into tension with the conjunction of our judgements about moral responsibility in, e.g., Frankfurt cases, and the thesis that moral responsibility requires causal responsibility. I conclude by criticising a strategy for rescuing the principle which itself relies on the intransitivity of causation. [In progress]
The Value of Democracy and How We Ought Vote. A paper about a puzzle in the ethics of democratic voting. I argue that prominent accounts of the value of democracy together with plausible auxiliary principles entail that the voting practices of a constituency have normative implications for how any individual within that constituency ought vote. Specifically, individuals are required to vote with whatever faction of the constituency democratically determines the relevant outcome with their votes (whether that be a majority, a plurality, or whatever). [In progress]