Indeterminacy and impotence

Abstract

Recent work in applied ethics has advanced a raft of arguments regarding individual responsibilities to address collective challenges like climate change or the welfare and environmental impacts of meat production. Frequently, such arguments suggest that individual actors have a responsibility to be more conscientious with their consumption decisions, that they can and should harness the power of the market to bring about a desired outcome. A common response to these arguments, and a challenge in particular to act-consequentialist reasoning, is that it “makes no difference” if one takes conscious consumption action or not – that one is “causally impotent” to change an outcome. In this paper, I break causal impotence objections into three distinct lines of argument and present causal indeterminacy as a third, unexplored variation of much more common causal impotence lines. I suggest that the causal indeterminacy argument presents additional challenges to consequentialist moral theory because it acknowledges that individual actions can have an impact on outcome, but suggests instead that the outcome can neither be known nor secured by the action itself.

A Scalar Approach to Vaccination Ethics

“…The probability that one’s close contacts would in any case be infected by someone else (i.e., by others apart from P ) is morally relevant. This idea is closely linked to that of causal indeterminacy, which occurs “when one or more intervening agents actively interferes with or thwarts another agent’s actions” (Hale 2022 : 7). If an agent’s goal is to ensure that another person does not become infected, then this goal may be more or less likely to be impeded by other agents and states of affairs.…”