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 Honore 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 then 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 criticizes 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.

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).

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