Causation and Responsibility: An Essay in Law, Morals, and Metaphysics

The concept of causation is fundamental to ascribing moral and legal responsibility for events. Yet the relationship between causation and responsibility remains unclear. What precisely is the connection between the concept of causation used in attributing responsibility and the accounts of causal relations offered in the philosophy of science and metaphysics? How much of what we call causal responsibility is in truth defined by non-causal factors? This book argues that much of the legal doctrine on these questions is confused and incoherent, and offers the first comprehensive attempt since Hart and Honoré to clarify the philosophical background to the legal and moral debates. The book first sets out the place of causation in criminal and tort law and outlines the metaphysics presupposed by the legal doctrine. It then analyses the best theoretical accounts of causation in the philosophy of science and metaphysics, and using these accounts criticises many of the core legal concepts surrounding causation - such as intervening causation, forseeability of harm and complicity. It considers and rejects the radical proposals to eliminate the notion of causation from law by using risk analysis to attribute responsibility. The result of the analysis is a powerful argument for revising our understanding of the role played by causation in the attribution of legal and moral responsibility.

Table of Contents:
I. The Role of Causation in Moral and Legal Responsibility 1: The Embedding of Causation in Legal Liability Doctrines 2: Causation and Moral Blameworthiness 3: Causation and the Permissibility of Consequentialist Justification within Agent-Relative Morality and the Law II. Presuppositions about the Nature of Causation by Legal Doctrines 4: The Law's Own Characterizations of its Causal Requirements 5: The Prima Facie Demands of the Law on the Concept of Causation 6: Pruning the Law's Demands on a Concept of Causation III. The First Blind Alley: The Attempt to Replace Proximate Causation with Culpability as a Prerequisite for Legal Liability 7: 'Negligence in the Air Will Not Do' 8: Conceptual Problems in Applying the Harm-within-the- Risk Test to Crimes/Torts of Negligence 9: Normative Problems in Applying the Harm-within-the- Risk Test to Crimes/Torts of Negligence 10: The Descriptive Inaccuracy of the Harm-within-the- Risk Analysis as Measuring Proximate Causation IV. The Legal Presupposition of There Being 'Intervening Causes' 11: The Legal Doctrines of Intervening Causation 12: The Lack of any Metaphysical Basis for the Doctrines of Intervening Causation 13: The Superfluity of Accomplice Liability V. The Metaphysics of Causal Relata 14: A Prolegomenon to the Issue of Causal Relata 15: The Facts, Events, States of Affairs, and Tropes Debate VI. The Metaphysics of the Causal Relation 16: Counterfactual Conditionals 17: The Counterfactual Theory of Causation 18: The Role of Counterfactual Dependence as an Independent, Non-causal Desert-determiner 19: Generalist Theories of Causation 20: Singularist Theories of Causation Appendix Contract Law and Causation: An Illustration Bibliography

About the Author :
Michael Moore holds the Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Chair at the University of Illinois, where he is jointly appointed as the Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy. His major works include Placing Blame (OUP, 1997), Act and Crime, (OUP, 1993) and Law and Psychiatry (CUP, 1984).

Review :
`Michael Moore's Causation and Responsibility offers an integrated conception of the law, morality, and metaphysice, centered on the notion of causation, grounded in a detailed knowledge of case law, and supported on every point by cogent argument. This is outstanding work. It is a worthy successor to Hart and Honoré's classic Causation in the Law, and I expect that it will guide discussion for many years to come.' Jonathan Schaffer, Legal Theory `The most comprehensive study of this topic since Hart and Honoré, this work pulsates with arguments and examples, all in the service of an integrated picture of the interactions between law, morals, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysics of causation. Moore's uncompromising realism brings a remarkable unity to his argument, and will form the starting point for any similar discussion from now onwards.' Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge `My very highest recommendation-this book deserves a place on the shelf of every legal academic.' Lawrence Solum `This must rank as one of the most successful applications of analytical philosophy to substantive questions of law ever. There are few important questions of criminal, tort, contract, and property law that are not in some significant way intertwined with issues of causation. As a result, there are few such questions that this book leaves untouched, or unchanged. The book should fire the imagination of all willing to look in a fresh way at some of the most fundamental problems of law. No one trying to think seriously about those problems will be able to proceed, nor indeed would want to proceed, without reckoning with its insights and arguments.' Leo Katz, Frank Carano Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School `Causation and Responsibility bustles with proactive ideas and arguments, explored with rigorous analysis and systematically' Sandy Steel, University of Cambridge, Law Quarterly Review