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

by Michael S. Moore

Overview

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? Causation and Responsibility argues that much of the legal doctrine on these questions is confused and incoherent, and offers the first comprehensive attempt since Hart and Honore to clarify the philosophical background to the legal and moral debates.
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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 analyzes the best theoretical accounts of causation in the philosophy of science and metaphysics, and using these accounts criticizes many of the core legal concepts surrounding causation - such as intervening causation, foreseeability 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199256860
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/27/2009
Pages:	640
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

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).

Table of Contents

I. The Role of Causation in Moral and Legal Responsibility1. The Embedding of Causation in Legal Liability Doctrines2. The 'Moral Luck' Debate About Results and Responsibility3. Causation and the Permissability of Consequentialist Justification within Agent-Relative MoralityII. Presuppositions about the Nature of Causation by Legal Doctrines4. The Law's Own Characterization of its Causal Requirements5. The Seeming Demands of the Law on the Concept of Causation: A First Pruning of Legal Doctrines6. A Second Pruning of the Law's Demands on a Concept of CausationIII. The First Blind Alley: The Attempt to Replace Proximate Causation with Culpability as a Prerequisite to Legal Liability7. The Historical Development of the 'Harm Within the Risk' Idea in Anglo-American Law8. Conceptual Problems for All Versions of Harm Within the Risk Analyses9. Normative Problems for All Versions of Harm Within the Risk Analyses10. The Descriptive Inaccuracy of a Strong Version of Harm Within the Risk Analysis as Measuring Legal CausationIV. The Legal Supposition of There Being 'Intervening Causes'11. The Legal Doctrines of Intervening Causation12. The Lack of any Metaphysical (or Policy) Basis for the Doctrines of Intervening Causation13. Eliminating Accomplice Liability Along With the Doctrines of Intervening CausationV. The Metaphysics of Causal Relata14. The Candidates for the Relata of Singular Causal Relations15. The Fact versus Event DebateVI. The Metaphysics of the Causal Relation16. Counterfactual Conditionals17. The Counterfactual Theory of Causation and its Problems18. Counterfactual Dependency as an Independent, Non-Causal Desert Basis19. Law Reductionist Theories of the Singular Causal Relation: Humean, Nomic Sufficiency, and Probabalistic20. The Many Hues of Singularist Theories of CausationAppendixContract Law and the Metaphysics of Causation

Editorial Reviews

The most comprehensive study of this topic since Hart and Honore, 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

"Causation and Responsibility bustles with proactive ideas and arguments, explored with rigorous analysis and systematically"
—Sandy Steel, University of Cambridge, Law Quarterly Review

"The book is rigorous in its analysis, breathtaking in its scope, and masterful in its effort to apply metaphysics to morality and law."
—Criminal Law and Philosophy

From the Publisher