Experimental Philosophy and Causal Attribution

Livengood, Jonathan; Rosé, David

doi:10.1002/9781118661666.ch30

Cited by 32 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…3 See Livengood and Sytsma (ms) for a recent line of evidence indicating that purely structural accounts fail to satisfy the FAD. 4 SeeDanks (2016) andLivengood and Rose (2016) for overviews of graphical causal modeling and of experimental work on causal attribution, respectively Sytsma and Livengood (2015). categorize work on causal attribution that is constrained by the FAD as part of a descriptive program in experimental philosophy.…”

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Following the FAD: Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation

Livengood¹,

Sytsma²,

Rose³

2021

Preprint

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© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. In the last decade, several researchers have proposed theories of actual causation that make use of structural equations and directed graphs. Many of these researchers are committed to a widely-endorsed folk attribution desideratum (FAD), according to which an important constraint on the acceptability of a theory of actual causation is agreement between the deliverances of the theory with respect to specific cases and the reports of untutored individuals about those same cases. In the present article, we consider a small collection of related theories of actual causation, including a purely structural theory and two theories that supplement the structural equations with considerations of defaults, typicality, and normality. We argue that each of these three theories are meant to satisfy the FAD, and then we present empirical evidence that they fail to do so for several variations on a simple scenario from the literature. Drawing on our previous work on the responsibility view of folk causal attribitons, we conclude by offering a solution that allows the latter two theories to satisfy the FAD for these cases. The solution is to give up on concerns with typicality and focus on injunctive norms in supplementing the graphical modeling machinery.

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Following the FAD: Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation

Livengood¹,

Sytsma²,

Rose³

2021

Preprint

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“…More generally, philosophers and psychologists have identified many interesting aspects of the process of causal attribution that we will not touch on in this paper. See Livengood and Rose (2016), Halpern and Hitchcock (2015), Kominsky et al (2015), and Halpern (2016) for much more detail. 2 Philosophers working on causation today are divided with respect to the proper target of their inquiry.…”

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Causal attributions and the trolley problem

Sytsma

Livengood

2021

Philosophical Psychology

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In this paper, we consider two competing explanations of the empirical finding that people's causal attributions are responsive to normative details, such as whether an agent's action violated an injunctive norm-the counterfactual view and the responsibility view. We then present experimental evidence that uses the trolley dilemma in a new way to investigate causal attribution. In the switch version of the trolley problem, people judge that the agent ought to flip the switch, but they also judge that she is more responsible for the resulting outcome when she does so than when she refrains. As predicted by the responsibility view, but not the counterfactual view, people are more likely to say that the agent caused the outcome when she flips the switch.

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“…This is an example of the Norm Effect, and several accounts compete to explain the underlying causal mechanisms (e.g. Gerstenberg & Icard, 2020;; for a review, see Willemsen & Kirfel, 2019; more generally, see Rose & Danks, 2012;Livengood & Rose, 2016;Henne, 2023;Bebb & Beebee, 2024). In the following, we will focus on but two such explanations: The Responsibility View and the Bias View.…”

Section: The Impact Of Norms On Perceived Causationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Causation, Norms, and Cognitive Bias

Güver,

Kneer

2024

Preprint

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Extant research has shown that ordinary causal judgments are sensitive to normative factors. For instance, agents who violate a norm are standardly deemed more causal than norm-conforming agents in identical situations. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for the Norm Effect: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. According to the former, the Norm Effect arises because ordinary causal judgment is intimately intertwined with moral responsibility. According to the alternative view, the Norm Effect is the result of a blame-driven bias. In a series of five preregistered experiments (N = 2688), we present evidence that predominantly favours the Bias View. In particular, and against predictions made by the Responsibility View, we show that participants deem agents who violate nonpertinent or silly norms – norms that do not relate to the outcome at hand – as more causal, and that this effect cannot be explained in terms of plausible mediators such as the agent’s foreknowledge and desire, or the foreseeability of harm. We close with a discussion regarding the implications of these findings, in as regards the just assessment of proximate cause in the law.

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Experimental Philosophy and Causal Attribution

Cited by 32 publications

References 68 publications

Following the FAD: Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation

Following the FAD: Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation

Causal attributions and the trolley problem

Causation, Norms, and Cognitive Bias

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