Authors
D.M. McHugh
Date (dd-mm-yyyy)
2019-11-15
Title
How to Cause the Inevitable
Publication Year
2019-11-15
Document type
Poster
Abstract
This talk is about how events which we commonly take to be inevitable, such as death, can have causes. Contemporary dependence approaches to actual causation are committed to the idea that only contingent events can have causes. In this talk we make two contributions to recent analyses of actual causation (such as Lewis, 1973, 2000; Yablo, 2002; Halpern and Pearl, 2005; Halpern, 2016; Beckers and Vennekens, 2018). Firstly, we raise a general problem for the most popular solution to the problem of inevitable effects. Secondly, we adapt a recent account (Beckers and Vennekens, 2018) to explain under what conditions inevitable events have causes. The upshot is a clearer view on a seemingly intractable problem for actual causation.
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/8c1db2e6-e757-405d-a71f-b0ce7ea73d04