Cause, Effect, And Fake Causation

JOHANNES PERSSON

CAUSE, EFFECT, AND FAKE CAUSATION

ABSTRACT. The possibility of apparently negative causation has been discussed in anumber of recent works on causation, but the discussion has suffered from being scattered.In this paper, the problem of apparently negative causation and its attempted solutions areexamined in more detail. I discuss and discard three attempts that have been suggestedin the literature. My conclusion is negative: Negative causation shows that the traditionalcause&effect view is inadequate. A more unified causal perspective is needed.

1. THE CAUSE&EFFECT VIEW AND ITS TWO HUMEAN ROOTS

Traditionally causation theories often are cause&effect views, i.e., theyclaim that when “c causes e” or “E because C” is true, a cause and an effectexist. The Humean view of causation is a particularly important source,which can be put roughly as follows:

HUMEAN1One particular object or object-involving event of type A – call it A1 – is truly said tobe the cause of another particular object or object-involving event of type B – call it B1– just in case A1 is prior to and spatio-temporally contiguous to B1, and all objects orevent-involving events of type A are prior to and spatio-temporally contiguous to objectsor object-involving events of type B. (Strawson 1989, 8–9)

HUMEAN1 accounts are not the only cause&effect views. “We may definea cause to be an object followed by another, and where all the objects,similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the other”, Humefirst contributes to HUMEAN1 but then continues: “Or, in other words,where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed”(Hume 1777/1902, Section VII). The counterfactual view is the secondmain version of the cause&effect view:

HUMEAN2The event E1 depends causally on the event C1 iff ‘E1 occurs’ depends counterfactuallyon ‘C1 occurs’. (Compare Lewis 1973a)

A number of contemporary instances of HUMEAN1 and HUMEAN2could be found, but to identify them is not the purpose of this paper;instead I will take an interest in their limitations. Cause&effect views facea number of intriguing difficulties, and the following problem of “negative

Synthese 131: 129–143, 2002.© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

130 JOHANNES PERSSON

causation” is particularly interesting. It is central to D. H. Mellor’s TheFacts of Causation; it seems recently to have motivated David Lewis tochange his earlier views (see Lewis 1999); and Phil Dowe employs it tosuggest a distinction between genuine causation and – what I will call– fake causation (Dowe 1999). The impact of the problem of negativecausation requires a more thorough examination than it has so far received.The conclusion in this paper partly resembles Mellor’s: The cause&effectview cannot proceed by admitting negative causes, and negative causationindeed shows that the cause&effect view is inadequate. But it adds tothe previous discussion both by arguing that neither Armstrong’s (1978)appeal to ignorance nor Dowe’s acceptance of fake causation can dissolvethe problem. A unified account treating genuine and fake causation alikeis needed, but such an account cannot be provided within the cause&effectperspective.

2. BEYOND THE CAUSE&EFFECT APPROACH: PREVENTION AND

OMISSIONS

[T]he same thing is the cause of contrary results. For that which by its presence bringsabout one result is sometimes blamed for bringing about the contrary by its absence. Thuswe ascribe the wreck of a ship to the absence of the pilot whose presence was the cause ofits safety. (Aristotle 1985, II.3, 333)

The cause&effect view doesn’t get unconditional support from our in-tuitions. Looking at how we ordinarily think about causation, causationwith causes and effects does not exhaust the possibilities. Quite oftenwe report instances of causation without both causes and effects. Wherecauses seem to be lacking, we typically speak of omissions. In some casesa phenomenon takes place because a hindrance is lacking: “The father’sinattention was the cause of the child’s accident”. Where effects seem tobe lacking, we often speak of prevention. In some cases a phenomenondoes not occur because of the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of another:“We didn’t go to Lund that morning because it was snowing a lot”. Thisis bad news for the cause&effect view. It accounts for causation by sayingthat causal reports are made true partly by their causes and effects, butaccording to our experience this story doesn’t fit all causal facts.

One may object to this way of framing the problem. It is notoriouslydifficult to argue from intuitions and everyday experiences. The aboveintroduction to the problem of negative causation seems ineffective. Is itreally worthy of attention?

Yes. First, it can be noted that those advocates of the cause&effect viewwho have approached the problem concerning negative causal reports have

CAUSE, EFFECT, AND FAKE CAUSATION 131

been hesitant to argue against the assumption that we normally think andspeak about negative causation. Unlike many other areas, there seem tobe few contradictory intuitions at this level of debate. Reports of negat-ive causation do much of the same work as “positive” reports. Second,a problem with intuitions and experiences in general, and causal ones inthis case, is that they may be too infected by previous and contemporarytheorising to be of any use. But here that risk is low. The cause&effectparadigm has been very influential, and should have made us suspiciousof causation without causes and effects. Still such causation exists in ourthoughts. These causal intuitions are not theory-laden but in conflict withtheory. Though often sceptical about what “descriptive” metaphysics cantell us about the world, I think this might be an exception.

Before we go on it should be noted that some philosophers claim thatat a more reflective level there is a difference in our intuitions concerningnegative and positive causal reports. Dowe speaks of such an “intuition ofdifference”:

I claim that we can recognise, on reflection, that certain cases of prevention or omission[. . . ] are not really cases of genuine causation. Call this the ‘intuition of difference’. Wealso feel, however, that the ‘mistake’ of treating them as if they were causation doesn’tmatter for practical purposes. (Dowe 1999, 3)

Dowe correctly notices that in addition to his intuitions from reflection,several philosophical debates on related issues (such as passive/active eu-thanasia) seem to strengthen the case for claiming that there are somedifferences in our reflected intuitions about positive and negative causalreports. Given the influence of the cause&effect view, however, the resultsof these observations are much less surprising, and lend less support to theview that negative causal reports are not genuine causal reports than our(more immediate) intuitions to the contrary.

I assume in the following that our negative and positive causal thoughtsare sufficiently similar to make it necessary for the advocates of thecause&effect view to somehow account for this similarity. That is, thefollowing discussion is not conducted under the presumption that the onlyacceptable solution is to make negative cases as causal as positive ones,although that is the position I in fact advocate. At this point it is an openquestion whether an approach that accounts for negative causation in otherterms is viable. In the next sections I discuss and discard three accounts ofthis similarity from within the cause&effect perspective.


3. FIRST ATTEMPT: “EVEN IF WE HAVEN’T NOTICED, THERE IS

ALWAYS SOMETHING POSITIVE GOING ON IN THE NEGATIVE

CASES”

The reason why seemingly negative cases are reported as causal, it is some-times claimed, is that there is always some positive causation going on inthem. In his 1978 book, Armstrong defends such a view:

[W]hen we reflect a little on such cases, we are very ready to admit that the actual causalprocesses involved proceed solely in virtue of the (positive) properties of the situation. Tosay that the lack of water caused his death reflects not a metaphysic of the causal efficacyof absences but merely ignorance. Certain (positive) processes were going on in his body,processes which, in absence of water, resulted in a physiological condition in virtue ofwhich the predicate ‘dead’ applied to his body. (Armstrong 1978, 44)

In all our previous examples there might easily be hidden ongoing pro-cesses triggered by – or resulting in – something positive. The child’sdesire to catch the balloon might be what, in a positive sense, causedthe accident (not the father’s inattention). The heavy snowfall might have“positively” caused our staying in Malmö (rather than our not-going toLund). In the quotation, Armstrong seems to claim that this is always thecase.

An attractive feature of this suggestion is that it would be open toall cause&effect views. Cause&effect views are put together in order tohandle positive causation, and if they are successful at this, the allegedfact that every instance of negative causation is nothing but a positiveinstance in disguise would make them successful also in handling negativecausation.

Unfortunately, the existence of possibly unrecognised positive entitiesin the causal relation is not enough in order to handle the problem of negat-ive causation. There are at least two reasons for this. To begin with, positiveentities in a causal process cannot do anything to prove that the negativeones do not count. Regardless of whether positive causes in a process thatwas previously reported as an omission (or a prevention) are discovered, itcan rightfully still be reported as an omission or a prevention. Even if pos-itive causes have entered the process, the previously recognised absencesmight still be causally linked. It would simply be to beg the question if oneanswered that the negative ones can be excluded since causation has to bea relation between concrete entities. This problem cannot easily be solved,one intriguing difficulty being that the positive events that might makenegative reports true are not likely to stand in the same kinds of causalrelations as the original report asserted. One attempt to circumvent theobjection would be to claim that we have misrepresented the first attempt.


It is not launched as an alleged proof of the non-existence of negativecausation; what is established is merely the possibility of genuine caus-ation between positives in scenarios that look negative from the presentepistemic perspective. Indeed, such a claim would be consistent with ourinitial characterisation of a cause&effect view: when “c causes e” or “Ebecause C” is true, a cause and an effect exist does not entail that the causeand effect are c and e. I have no quarrel with such a reformulation, but thenit is far too weak for the present purposes. Unless the relation between pos-itive and negative causation is explained, we have done nothing to handlethe problem of negative causation.

Second, on closer examination a lot of positive causation turns out toinvolve negative entities. Here is an example originated by Michael Mc-Dermott and Phil Dowe: Chopping off someone’s head causes death (ifanything causes anything), but does so as a prevention, since choppingoff the head prevents processes which would have caused the person tocontinue living. And as in this example so in general. For all we know,there might be as many hidden omissions and cases of prevention as thereare hidden positive parts of the causal process.

4. SECOND ATTEMPT: “NEGATIVE ENTITIES CAN ALSO BE CAUSES

AND EFFECTS”

Because of the failure of the first attempt one might be tempted to dividethe causal world into a positive and a negative hemisphere. The positivehalf would have objects with ordinary properties, hitting each other as bil-liard balls do. The negative half would be inhabited by negative stuff, suchas omissions, absences and not-goings-to-Lund. Both hemispheres, andtheir intersection, would share the same kinds of causal relations. In thatway we would not much have to change our traditional view of causation.

The way this idea promises to handle negative causation is also at-tractive. If omissions and cases of prevention are negative entities, and ifnegative entities behave in much the same way as positive causal entitiesdo, we do not even have to speak of disguises in order to explain whynegative causal reports are causal.

A temporary drawback of the suggestion is that few of the existingtheories of causation currently accept negative relata. One of the prominentHUMEAN2 views, Lewis’s earlier counterfactual account of causation,has difficulty with negative events because of their highly disjunctive char-acter (see Lewis 1986, 189–193, and Dowe 1999), and Armstrong doesnot accept negative facts at all (Armstrong 1997, 134–135). However,some theories, such as Suppes’s HUMEAN1 inspired probabilistic theory


of causation (Suppes 1970) doesn’t explicitly rule out the possibility ofnegative relata of causation. Nor do the manipulability views of Gaskingand von Wright – but then it is hardly correct to understand manipulabilityin terms of causes and effects in the first place.

4.1. Against negative properties

The real and permanent difficulty is that the above story can be successfulonly if negative causes and effects exist, and the kinds of entities usuallythought of as causal relata are problematic to conceive of as negative. First,there is Ramsey’s argument against complex properties:

[T]his theory will hold that there are three closely related propositions; one asserts that therelation R holds between the terms a and b, the second asserts the possession by a of thecomplex property of ‘having R to b’, while the third asserts that b has the complex propertythat a has R to it. These must be three different propositions because they have differentsets of constituents, and yet they are not three propositions, but one proposition, for theyall say the same thing, namely that a has R to b. So the theory of complex universalsis responsible for an incomprehensible trinity, as senseless as that of theology. (Ramsey1925/1954, 118)

If valid this argument has a substantial impact on several attempts tobuild negative relata of causation. Consider for instance Kim’s view ofevents (Kim 1973, 1980), according to which events are instantiations ofa property – at a time – by a substance. Following Kim, events cannot benegative unless properties can be negative, and according to Ramsey theycannot. Now, the argument Ramsey offers has been disputed. A modernformulation of it (Mellor 1991) was recently attacked by Oliver (1992)and Botterell (1998). It is clear that the Ramsey–Mellor argument containsseveral implicit assumptions. According to the argument, the two-place re-lation (R) and the two one-place relational properties (aR) and (Rb) wouldconstitute three facts that couldn’t be identical because the constitutentsdiffered. To see that the constituents would differ is not difficult – one isa relation, the other a property, etc. So granted that these constituents bythemselves can constitute three facts, we are led to compare this situationwith the holy trinity (satisfactory perhaps for men of the church but not forCambridge philosophers). What happens if we question this assumption?Perhaps a Ramsey-fact consists of six constituents: a, b, R, aR, Rb, andaRb? Similarly, in Mellor’s version of the argument:

[S]uppose there are, i.e., that there are properties U , V , and W such that ∼P = U , P ∨Q =V and P&Q = W . Then Ua and ∼Pa, for example, are the very same state of affairs. Butthey can’t be, because they have different constituents: the first containing U but not P ,the second P but not U . And similarly for V a and Pa ∨ Qa, and for Wa and Pa&Qa. Sothere are no such properties as U , V and W – which is not of course to deny the existenceof the predicates ‘U ’, ‘V ’ and ‘W ’. (Mellor 1991, 179)


What says that a single Mellor-fact does not consist of a, P , ∼, ∼P , Pa,and ∼Pa? There are probably good reasons why this cannot be the case.Wouldn’t it, for instance, be very problematic to have both P and ∼P asproperties in the same fact? The argument deserves further discussion, butthe position that in the meantime seems to be left open for the believerin complex properties is not attractive. Few who believe in the ontolo-gical importance of properties and facts would be inclined to accept suchmultiple counting. In practice, the Ramsey–Mellor argument is more com-pelling than the recent critique of it suggests, and it seems in these causalcircumstances to be a powerful argument against negative properties.

Not all views of events and facts utilise explicitly the idea that eventsand facts are simply instantiations of properties, so it is interesting to seethat there are both independent and related problems with negative objects,events, and facts.

4.2. Against negative objects and events

Mellor has employed another Ramsey-inspired argument against negativeobjects. Let us assume that there is a non-king of Italy making “Italy hasno king” true. Then, since it is an indisputable fact that “Italy has no king”entails “Italy has no unmarried king” the existence of the non-king mustguarantee this. It seems that the only way for him to do so is by beingunmarried. But of course, “Italy has no king” also entails “Italy has nomarried king” and the non-king can hardly be both married and unmarried,and can therefore not exist in the first place. A slight modification makesthe argument apply to negative events as well. Let us start by assumingthat “Don does not die because he does not fall” is a true negative causalreport. Then “Don does not die” and “Don does not fall” have to be true.If we believe that events are the relata of causation, “Don does not die”can be assumed to be made true by a negative event. But, as we saw above,“Don does not die” entails “Don does not die painfully” and “Don does notdie painlessly”, and the event cannot be both painful and painless, so wewere wrong in assuming the negative event; hence the cause&effect viewcannot handle the situation in this way.

There is a recent critique of this argument also. Dorothy Edging-ton (1997) and Paul Noordhof (1998) both criticised the argument intheir reviews of Mellor’s The Facts of Causation. It is instructive to seewhy their objections are inadequate in this context. Noordhof’s objec-tion presupposes a firm distinction between positive and negative causalreports:

In abstract, my claim is that it is not legitimate to suggest that if f causes g is a causalstatement relating positive events, then what makes not-f cause not-g are two negative


events: non-occurrence of f and non-occurrence of g. Rather there are various positiveevents each of which – given the laws which hold – would make the negative causalstatement true and one of which, in fact, did make it true in the circumstances. (Noordhof1998, 858)

What Noordhof does is simply to deny the negative event-approach (and tofavour instead the first attempt in Section 3), but this cannot be an objectionto Mellor’s argument, which supposedly shows that negative effects do notexist. Hence it is irrelevant to the evaluation of the second attempt. In thesecircumstances, Edgington’s objection is not more to the point:

If anyone did wish to maintain that ‘Don does not die painlessly’ required the existence ofan event, it would have to be an event which is either a non-death, or a death which is notpainless. The fallacy is a failure to distinguish the scope of negation: non-(painless death)as opposed to painless (non-death). (Edgington 1997, 422)

Edgington points out that we can interpret “Don does not die painlessly”in more ways than Mellor assumes in his argument. There is for instancean additional event-existence interpretation, namely that there is a deathwhich does not have a certain property, but Mellor does not consider thatpossibility. Since it wouldn’t be a negative event Mellor is mistaken inassuming that, if an event was entailed by “Don does not die painlessly” itwould be negative. If this really is Edgington’s objection it seems to basedon a misrepresentation. Mellor starts by assuming both that “Don does notdie because he does not fall” and that (D) “Don does not die” are true, andthen he examines whether event-causation can make sense of this case. But“Don does not die” is not compatible with the existence of a death of Don,only with a non-death of him. There is no room for Edgington’s kind ofmanoeuvre. What we can do is (a) to go for Noordhof’s suggestion, (b) toconclude with Mellor that “Don does not die because he does not fall” doesnot report causation between particulars, or (c) to resist the claim that ifthere is a negative event that makes “Don does not die” true, “Don does notdie painlessly” follows from it. Since (a) gives up the second attempt, and(b) gives up the first and the second attempt, it is only (c) that remains as apossibility within the second attempt. But it is a rather desperate option. Toaccept it would imply that language cannot at all guide us in metaphysicalinquiry.

Now, few believe in negative objects and proponents of events as causalrelata seldom conceive of them in the Davidsonian way that Mellor’sargument presupposes. Furthermore, there are still only few accounts ofcausation that take causes and effects to be properties, so it is not likelythat Ramsey’s and Mellor’s arguments will play the most salient role in adebate over the second suggestion.


4.3. Against negative facts

I believe the position is different with regard to facts and events that aresimilar in nature to facts (for instance, both Kim’s and Lewis’s events aremore similar to facts than to objects). And negative facts do seem morecredible than other negative stuff.

There are three kinds of arguments that show why negative facts nev-ertheless are problematic. Two of them relate facts to their constituents– constituents that we have already seen cannot be negative, and the firstbuilds on the observation in Persson and Sahlin (1999), that an argumentstructurally similar to the above two can be used against negative facts. Weseem to be able to mimic Mellor’s argument against negative events: It isan undeniable fact that (S) “Don does not die” entails both (S1) “Don doesnot die because he smokes in bed”, and (S2) “Don does not die because hedrinks whisky in his hotel room”. Let us now assume that there are negativefacts, and furthermore that such a negative fact (F) makes S true. Since inthese circumstances we take “because” to be a causal connective, and sinceDon in fact drank whisky and smoked in bed, S1 and S2 seem to reveal thatF has the most diverse causes. Since F clearly does not have these causes,it does not exist in the first place. The supposed problem here, as above, isthat while we cannot deny that the entailments between S, S1 and S2 hold,after accepting F we can no longer employ the explanation why we thinkso (in this case, probably, that on any theory of causation “E because C”entails “C” and “E”, so by modus tollens we have that “∼E” entails “∼(Ebecause C)”. If we are dealing with truly negative facts, there is no easytransition from “E” via “∼∼E”).

The second argument focuses on the constituents of facts. It is oftenclaimed that a fact is structured in some way. According to the traditionalunderstanding of atomic facts, for example, these have both object- andproperty-constituents. I favour the trope-view of facts below, but it is valu-able to see that negative facts are in trouble also on the traditional view.Some causal reports, like Mellor’s: “Kim’s use of contraception causesher to have no children”, might be thought to report a relation betweentwo facts, one positive (Kim uses contraception) and one negative (Kimhas no children). Examining the supposed negative fact, we see that thepredicate “has no children” can be taken to apply to Kim because she hasa negative property of having no children. But since there are no negativeproperties this way of having negative facts won’t work. What we meanwhen we report such things about Kim is that certain facts about Kim donot exist. As Mellor remarks, “has no children” applies to Kim simplybecause no particulars of a certain kind – children of Kim – exist (Mellor


1995, 162). On the traditional view facts are not negative, but negativetruths sometimes hold because no such facts exists.

A related reason for rejecting negative facts emerges when facts areconceived of as tropes, or property instances (for a defence of such viewssee Bacon 1995 and Persson 2000). If facts are tropes, the existence of neg-ative facts would require negative tropes, i.e., negative property instances.But if negative property instances do not exist, a case that for instancecan be argued for along Ramsey’s lines, there can be no negative factseither. On the trope-view of facts it seems even clearer that there can be nonegative facts.

If these and similar arguments are successful, we can show that thereare no negatives in the world. And so, in a sense, no positives either. Theworld is blind to the positive/negative distinction, and the second attemptfails both in that few existing theories of causation allow negative relataand in that there are powerful arguments against the existence of the kindof negative properties, objects, events and facts, that we would need inorder to have this kind of negative causation.

5. THIRD ATTEMPT: “THERE IS GENUINE AND THERE IS FAKE

CAUSATION”

There appears to be one more way out for the advocate of the cause&effectview. It is sometimes claimed that we have causation, and then we havesomething that resembles causation, but really is not, since it does not in-volve concrete causes and effects. This third attempt distinguishes betweengenuine and fake causation. It differs from the previous attempts in nottrying to give a fully causal account of negative causation. An advocate ofthe third attempt may say: “You were wrong about the domain of the causalworld. It is narrower than you expected”. Much narrower, we may add, be-cause there are many more true negative reports than positive ones. Thoughnot faithful to our immediate intuitions, I think it is the cause&effect theor-ist’s only remaining alternative. If it is also unsatisfactory, as I argue it is,we have a strong indication that there is something about the cause&effectview itself that is deeply problematic.

What would fake causation be like? I think the natural idea is embeddedalready in Armstrong’s attempt: “Certain (positive) processes were goingon in his body, processes which, in absence of water, resulted in a physiolo-gical condition in virtue of which the predicate ‘dead’ applied to his body”(Armstrong 1978, 44). Armstrong’s idea seems to be that the process is thecause, not the absence. This doesn’t immediately solve the problem sincethe absence may now be thought to be a cause of the process instead. How


but causally can we interpret “processes which in absence of water . . . ”?There are two options: one can understand it as “absence of water causedprocesses . . . ”, or one can understand it counterfactually: “had there beenwater these processes would not . . . ” (Persson 1997, 55). The first, causal,reading cannot be utilised within the third attempt. It would simply turnthe attempt into the previous second attempt. The idea was to avoid causallinks in negative causal reports, and then one cannot import them at thenext level of analysis. That leaves us with the second reading, to understandnegative reports as counterfactual, but yet non-causal, reports.

This is also Dowe’s idea. He first tells us to distinguish between caus-ation and causation∗ (my fake causation) and then he gives the followingaccount:

Not-A fake-caused B if

1. B occurred and A did not, and there occurred an x such that2. x caused B, and3. if A had occurred then there would have been a causal relation between A and the

process due to x. (Dowe 1999, 15)

According to Dowe, fake causation claims are counterfactual claims aboutgenuine causation.

An important question has to do with the stuff in the world that thecounterfactual expression in (3) needs in order to be correct. Counterfac-tual accounts of genuine causation have to order possible worlds in a waythat makes the “right” causal reports come out true. But what makes onepossible world closer to the actual world than another? It should probablybe similarity-relations that count, but as Lewis admits, similarity can giverise to many different orderings:

The truth conditions for counterfactuals are fixed only within rough limits; like the relativeimportance of respects of comparison that underlie the comparative similarity of worlds,they are a highly volatile matter, varying with every shift of context or interest. (Lewis1973b, 92)

I cannot convince myself that it is possible to order worlds in a less volatileway unless one decides to keep some properties in the worlds fixed. Onlyif, for instance, we decide to compare worlds where the causal laws arethe same is it possible to judge whether a certain counterfactual is true.But since the notion of a law or another causal property is then alreadyassumed, counterfactual accounts do not tell us all there is to know aboutthe nature of causation. The fake causation account that Dowe suggestsseems to inherit some of these problems. Let us illustrate the situation with“Not-A fake-caused B”. According to the above account this is roughlya counterfactual expression about “A interferes with B”. If the previous


claim about counterfactual theories of causation is correct, fake causationclaims like this also depend on us only considering worlds where some-thing is kept fixed. Presumably, one thing that needs to be fixed is a law,and “entities of A-kind prevent entities of B-kind” seems to be a reasonablecandidate. It is of course not the only possibility, but the counterfactualelement in Dowe’s account of fake causation seems to require that weassume some such constancy of fake-causal properties through possibleworlds.

Depending on exactly what needs to be kept fixed, counterfactual the-ories of causation and fake causation tell us more or less about whatcausation and fake causation is. They never tell the complete story, though,and often they seem to implicitly rely on some more fundamental conceptof causation or law. These brief remarks are only intended to show the needfor a clear account of what in these possible worlds (as well as in the actualworld) makes certain fake causation claims appropriate and others not.

Apart from this more general comment, I think that three considerationsare of importance in evaluating fake causation. The first has to do withthe earlier claim about sufficient similarity. Why is it, for instance, thatcausation and fake causation are seldom distinguished from one another atthe surface level? It doesn’t seem to matter much whether we have to dowith “genuine” causation or its fake relative. Their functioning as power-ful means-end relations is one area where they cannot be distinguished.Their value when we are looking for ways to avoid risks is another. Thatit is impossible in most cases to detect which of the two we have is athird illustration. Furthermore, both function equally well in providing uswith evidential material. Dowe’s answer seems to be that our “practical”concept of causation might be disjunctive. In everyday life, “causation”perhaps means “genuine causation or fake causation”. But, clearly, unlesscausation and fake causation are closely linked at a more fundamental levela disjunctive concept would be useless, so an account like the above one isneeded to back up this story.

This brings us to the second consideration. Although similarity at ametaphysical level is needed, it is equally important that fake causationis not allowed to collapse into causation. We need a certain dissimilarityas well. One must be able to explain why fake causation is not causation.Look at Dowe’s condition (3). Is it sufficiently dissimilar from what onetakes genuine causal relations to be like? According to several HUMEAN2accounts, (3) is precisely the way genuinely causal reports are to be spelledout. If according to these accounts the only difference between (3) andgenuine causation is that the cause does not exist in (3), one may won-der about the ontological differences. It is too much of a causal report


to comfort me. Whether the problem resides in HUMEAN2 accounts, inDowe’s suggestion, or in both, is not my primary concern. They are not asatisfactory blend anyhow. Thus, the third attempt can only be combinedwith certain causal views. But from the fake causation perspective whetheror not a certain causal view is correct should be an independent question.

6. THE ANNIHILATION OF THE CAUSAL WORLD?

I think the problems with the two first attempts and the considerationsconcerning the similarities and dissimilarities between causation and fakecausation in the third attempt already strongly suggest a theory of causationthat treats both causation and fake causation as two kinds of causation –one with and one (partly) without causal relata. I want to end this paperby strengthening this case even more by applying a previously employedcounter example to the fake causation view above:

Even if we do not want to commit ourselves to the view that causationis transitive, we have to admit that it sometimes is. By previous observationit is then clear that when looking closely enough at causal chains that linkgenuine events, parts of them will probably turn out to be composed offake causation. But since fake causation according to the third attempt isnot causation, these causal chains break down on closer inspection. Whatappeared to be causal relations between two entities are no longer instancesof causation. As a consequence, we not only have to disregard a largeproportion of our causal reports, namely those that are clearly instancesof prevention or omission, but we must also disregard all those processeswhere at least one part of a causal chain consists of fake causation. Thereis thus a genuine possibility that all our causal reports are true (as statingcausation or fake causation, i.e. at the surface level) but that none is trulycausal. I find this possibility utterly implausible. Yet it is a consequenceof the third attempt. Any substantial metaphysical dissimilarity betweengenuine and fake causation will have a considerable price.

The most efficient way to escape this precarious situation is to abandonthe cause&effect perspective in metaphysics. Once this is done the meta-physical problem of fake causation dissolves. Fake causation is simplycausation (without a relation between cause and effect). But this avenueis not a possibility for theories rooted in the “Humean” tradition, whetherHUMEAN 1 or HUMEAN 2.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper, thanks to Alex-ander Bird, Phil Dowe, Bengt Hansson, Hugh Mellor, Rebecca Schweder,Matti Sintonen, Ann Tobin and Petri Ylikoski. I owe a special debt toNils-Eric Sahlin. Earlier versions of this paper were read in Krakowand Helsinki in 1999. This work was supported by the Bank of SwedenTercentenary Foundation.

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Cause, Effect, And Fake Causation