Do I cause global warming, climate change and their related harms when I go for a leisure drive with my gas-guzzling car? The current verdict seems to be that I do not; the emissions produced by my drive are much too insignificant to make a difference for the occurrence of global warming and its related harms. I argue that our verdict on this issue depends on what we mean by 'causation'. If we for instance assume a simple counterfactual analysis of causation according to which 'C causes E' means 'if C had not occurred, E would not have occurred', we must conclude that a single drive does not cause global warming. However, this analysis of causation is wellknown for giving counterintuitive results in some important cases. If we instead adopt Lewis's (2000) analysis of causation, it turns out that it is indeterminate whether I cause global warming (etc.) when I go for a single drive. Still, in contexts where we seek to control or understand global warming, there is a pressure to adopt a more fragile view of this event. When we adopt such a view, it turns out that a single drive does cause global warming (etc.). This means that we cannot like Sinnott-Armstrong (2005) and Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong (2018) reject the idea that I should refrain from going for a leisure drive simply because such a drive does not cause global warming. Keywords Causation. Causing harm. Causal influence. Global warming. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. David Lewis If I go for a leisure drive with my gas-guzzling car, am I then causing global warming and its related harms? In BIt's not my fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations^(2005) Walter Sinnott-Armstrong makes the case that I do not. This is the claim I question in this paper. Sinnott-Armstrong's paper has been extensively discussed, (for instance by Braham and Van
Iris Marion Young presents a social connection model on which those, and only those, who participate in structural processes that produce injustice have a forward-looking responsibility to redress the resulting injustice by challenging the structures that produce it (she sometimes calls this a political responsibility [Young 2011]). In Young's view, this is an all-things-considered, albeit discretionary, responsibility. I argue that participation in a structural process that produces injustice is neither necessary nor sufficient for having political responsibilities, and that therefore the social connection model must be rejected. A subtler model is needed, one that depicts participation in a structural process that produces injustice as sufficient (but not necessary) for having pro tanto forward-looking responsibilities to redress the process, unless the participating agent satisfies certain excusing conditions. I suggest the intuitive force of the thought that mere participation gives us political responsibilities can be explained by more fundamental considerations. Hastily, we might conclude that all participants have political responsibilities simply because most of them satisfy at least one of the following conditions: they cause injustice to continue, they are morally responsible for injustice, they benefit from injustice, they have communal ties with the victims of injustice, or they have the capacity to redress injustice.
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We refine the intuitively appealing idea that you are blameworthy for something if it happened because you did not care enough. More formally: you are blameworthy for X (where X may be an action, omission, or outcome) just in case there is the right causal-explanatory relation between your poor quality of will and X. First, we argue that blameworthiness for actions, omissions, and outcomes is concerned with negative differences: you are blameworthy for the fact that X occurred instead of X*, where X is worse than X*. Second, we argue that the way in which your quality of will is poor has to fit what you are blameworthy for. With these refinements, the account already gives intuitively correct verdicts in cases of forgetting, making a negative difference to a nevertheless good result, and doing an action with runaway consequences. We then discuss what the right causal-explanatory relation is and suggest that it is simply causation, understood in the right way. Here, we draw on the account of causation developed in Touborg, The Dual Nature of Causation. According to this account, there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for causation. Roughly, C causes E rather than E* iff (a) C is process-connected to E, and (b) C makes E more secure and E* less secure. With this account of causation, our account of blameworthiness now also gives correct verdicts in omission, pre-emption, and switching cases, Frankfurt-style cases, and collective harm cases.
Thank you for sharing your work and for tuning in to our conversation.Moreover, we would like to thank everyone at the Pufendorf Institute in Lund for their financial support, and for giving the group the opportunity to spend its Wednesdays at their beautiful premises.
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