Sytsma, Justin and Willemsen, Pascale and Reuter, Kevin
(2022)
Mutual Entailment Between Causation and Responsibility.
[Preprint]
Abstract
The standard view in philosophy is that responsibility entails causation. Most philosophers treat this entailment claim as an evident insight into the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Further, it is taken to be equally obvious that the reversal of this claim does not hold: causation does not entail responsibility. In contrast, the account of ordinary causal attributions put forward by Sytsma and Livengood predicts that “responsible for” and “caused” will generally be taken to apply in the same contexts. If the responsibility account is correct, then the reversal of the entailment claim may hold, and, a fortiori, there would be mutual entailment between the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Using the cancellability test, we report the results of three pre-registered studies providing empirical evidence that causation and responsibility are mutually entailed by each other.
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