Several Objections

To showcase the seriousness of the problem I have raised, I will next test the selection- based version of the epistemic argument against a battery of objections usually faced by the classic ‘cluelessness’ version.

(1) Scalarity

The scalarity response to the classic epistemic argument is that one should not grant much significance to distant consequences, as they tend to peter out after a time. Both causal relations and moral blameworthiness seem scalar notions, that is, matters of more-or-less which allow a comparison of degrees rather than matters of either-or. Several theorists explicitly endorse scalarity. For example:

● ‘The effects of any individual action seem, after a sufficient space of time, to be found only in trifling modifications spread over a very wide area, whereas its immediate effects consist in some prominent modification of a comparatively narrow area’. (Moore 1903: 153).

150 _{For instance: ‘For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of}

a horse the rider was lost; for want of a rider the battle was lost; for want of a battle the kingdom was lost – and all for the want of a horseshoe nail’. (Broadbent 2010: 18).

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● ‘[Remote consequences] approximate rapidly to zero like the furthermost ripples on a pond after a stone has been dropped on it’. (Smart and Williams 1973: 33).

● ‘[Causation is a] matter of continuous variation. We live in an analogue world, a world more accurately depicted by the delicate shadings of water colours than by the bright lines of mosaic tiles (Quine 1960: 127)’. (Moore 2012: 446).

Admittedly, the scalar nature of causation is a controversial issue (cf. Chapter 3, Section 3.2). However, things become clearer if attention is focused on the causal ramification in dynamic systems with high sensitivity to small variations in initial conditions (Lenman 2000). For instance, we cannot possibly know the extremely widespread differences made by financial markets to people’s plans, states of mind, or safety, but at the same time it would be absurd to claim that the effects flowing from a certain dynamics of financial markets fail to reach individuals’ lives because they peter out in time. It is precisely in this kind of systems that one cannot avoid taking into consideration remote consequences (as any small-scale action, e.g., a particular financial transaction, will ramify massively). But a defender of the classic epistemic argument could accept the challenge and focus on the immediate effects of an act, viz. those consisting in some ‘prominent modifications’. It is in this case that a selection- based version of the epistemic argument becomes relevant. How exactly is a ‘prominent modification’ delineated and what makes others less prominent? And if several such immediate consequences are generated, which one should determine the moral status of an act? What if they turn out to be qualitatively different? Without getting into too many details, the general idea is that problems of effect selection may consolidate the classic epistemic argument.

(2) Cancelling-Out

Another potential move to be made against the classic epistemic argument is Kagan’s ‘cancelling out’ response:

[I]t remains true that there will be a very small chance of some totally unforeseen disaster resulting from your act. But it seems equally true that there will be a correspondingly very small chance of your act resulting in something fantastically wonderful, although totally unforeseen. If there is indeed no reason to expect either, then the two possibilities will cancel each other out as we try to decide how to act. (Kagan 1998: 65).

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The thought here is that totally unforeseen and remote good and bad consequences will somehow cancel each other out allowing the foreseen consequences to count. Supporters of the cluelessness argument could argue against the existence of obvious empirical or a priori probabilistic grounds to assume the cancelling-out hypothesis (see Lenman [2000] for a detailed discussion), that is, even if such a hypothesis looks plausible there is no evidence for it. However, a theorist who relies on the effect selection argument could accept the cancelling-out idea (at least as far as remote consequences are concerned). For I have mentioned that even if consequentialists manage to deal with the quantitative concern and focus on an area of relevant proximate effects, any act would still generate a multiplicity of effects and side-effects requiring some selection criteria. In addition, one may ask if the cancelling-out hypothesis does not apply in this restricted area of consequences – after all, when is causal ramification complex enough so that good and bad consequences will cancel each other out?

(3) Actual vs. Expected Consequences, Rightness vs. Decision-Procedure

Another popular objection to classic epistemic arguments (Jackson 1991, Railton 1984, Kagan 1998) goes as follows: it does not matter that a significant number of consequences are unforeseen because the moral status of an act is not determined by the whole set of actual, objective consequences flowing from that act, but only by the expected, subjective consequences a reasonable agent could envisage. But one problem is that we need to answer why we should take into account subjective expected consequences and the simple answer is that in many morally relevant cases the expected consequences are simply means of approximating objective rightness. If we do not know how objectively right an action will be – either because we are clueless about its remote consequences, or because we cannot distinguish between its relevant and irrelevant consequences – then the objection fails. If the expected consequences are not means of approaching objective rightness, then we could not possibly assess the moral status of an act.

According to a different, more refined version of this objection, consequentialism should provide a general criterion of rightness rather than a decision procedure – that is, it should be a principle about the moral status of our acts rather than

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about the way we come to know and understand what the morally right act is.151 But the two must be somehow related, in the sense that a theory endorsing a criterion of rightness should also generate an action-guiding rule. If it generates such an action- guiding rule, then epistemic arguments become relevant again (as we should govern our conduct in the light of what we know about the consequences of our acts). If it does not, then we end up with a sort of disengagedconsequentialism, perhaps true, but useless in this world (Lenman 1998: 360-361).

(4) Companions in Guilt I (Kagan)

Another objection against the cluelessness argument takes the companions in guilt form:

[The Epistemic Argument] threatens not only consequentialism, but indeed all plausible normative theories. For if it is in fact impossible to get a grip on the consequences of an act, then this problem will be inherited by all theories that give this factor any weight at all and this will be virtually all theories, For... all plausible theories agree that goodness of consequences is at least one factor relevant to the moral status of acts. (Kagan 1998: 64).

In reply, it is worthwhile to remind the reader that epistemic arguments make sense against pure consequentialism and not all moral theories out there give the same weight to all consequences following from an act. Non-consequentialists may simply choose to ignore remote consequences as morally irrelevant. On the other hand, the way we individuate consequences is indeed a concern for virtually all normative theories granting them any weight. For not having clear and stable principles of effect selection makes it difficult to get a grip on the consequences that matter. Therefore, while the cluelessness argument cannot be meaningfully extended to affect non-consequentialist theories, the effect selection argument could in principle affect all plausible normative theories taking consequences into account.

(5) Companions in Guilt II (Dorsey)

A similar objection against the cluelessness argument goes as follows:

I shan’t dispute the claim that many of the consequences of our actions are unknowable to us. The question I shall address is whether the fact of cluelessness should worry the advocate of consequentialism. I claim it should not. In particular, I argue that there is very good reason to believe that the problem of cluelessness for consequentialism is only as embarrassing for consequentialism as the spectre of epistemological skepticism is embarrassing for metaphysical realism. But coping with epistemological skepticism rarely

151 _{Lenman (2000: 360) remarks that such a move is revisionist in that it maintains consequentialism as}

an account of objective rightness while at the same time advancing a non-consequentialist story about subjective rightness.

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tempts anyone to abandon metaphysical realism. Moral philosophers should face no greater temptation when it comes to consequentialism. (Dorsey 2012: 49).

One may be immediately tempted to answer that this is not much of an argument. After all, a particular position is not made true by the fact that the philosophers supporting it fail to give in to certain temptations. It may be that metaphysical anti-realism is true, and if it is, its truth would be completely independent from whatever temptations metaphysical realists happen to disregard.152 The same goes for consequentialism and its foes. On a different note, if one takes scepticism seriously, the options are (a) to accept the truth of scepticism but continue to support metaphysical realism anyway, (b) to accept the truth of scepticism and deny metaphysical realism, or (c) to hold that sceptical challenges affect consequentialism but not metaphysical realism (Dorsey 2012: 51). I am happy to allow option (c) so that the sceptical argument from analogy goes through. According to option (a) we accept that scepticism is true but continue to work with the things in the world as they appear to us (Norcross 1990). In Dorsey’s terms, we ‘soldier on’ and ‘make do with what we have’ (Dorsey 2012: 58). Two remarks are in order: first, ‘soldiering on’ may be interpreted in a positive key as a way of dealing with the sceptical challenge, in the sense that when we make do with what we have we leave sceptical worries aside. By extension, consequentialism could be defended as a view that makes do with the consequences we know about while leaving aside epistemic worries about remote consequences. However, if ‘soldiering on’ bypasses the argument from cluelessness, it cannot avert the epistemic argument from effect selection, which affects precisely the comparable quality of the consequences we know about. Second, ‘soldiering on’ may also be interpreted in a more negative key as a way of acknowledging the stringency of the sceptical challenge. This interpretation leads to the last option, (b), accepting the truth of scepticism and rejecting metaphysical realism. By extension, this option implies acknowledging the seriousness of the epistemic arguments and holding that consequentialism fails as a result. While I shall not argue for or against metaphysical realism as an answer to scepticism, it is worth pointing out that one may at least cast doubt on metaphysical realism about causation (cf. Chapter I), which seems to be especially relevant in this context both to consequentialism and to the epistemic arguments against it. More clearly, if there are

152 _{And why would they not disregard or look to downplay the strength of arguments supporting the}

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some reasons to take seriously certain concerns about causal realism, perhaps one should be similarly worried about causal consequentialism.

If my epistemic argument against consequentialism survives these objections, we end up with weak reasons to think that our actions are right or wrong by consequentialist principles.153

4. Conclusions

In this chapter, I examined the problem of effect selection and argued that a prospective account will need to strike a balance between two unappealing extremes: (a) the claim that effects and by-products are metaphysically distinct, and (b) the claim that there is no sense in which effects and by-products are objectively different and selection is always governed by context-dependent pragmatics. I argued that despite the strong sense that effects and by-products are essentially different, the criteria governing their differentiation are not clear or predictable. Furthermore, I used the results gleaned from the first sections of the chapter to develop an epistemic argument against consequentialism. I defended this argument against several objections.

153 _{The success of consequentialism may not be related to the number or comparable quality of}

consequences, but to the clarification of our status as moral agents within complex causal chains. On the one hand, we have no problem to describe physical effects as reverberating as far as the laws of the universe allow: ‘an explosion may cause a flash of light which will be propagated as far as the outer nebulae’ (Hart and Honoré 1985: 68). On the other hand, we seem reluctant to treat actions similarly (at least sometimes). As Nagel famously remarked, the idea of agency is incompatible with actions and people being part of natural causal networks, ‘[b]ut as the external determinants of what someone has done are gradually exposed, in their effect on consequences, character, and choice itself, it becomes gradually clear that actions are events and people things. Eventually nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised’. Nagel (1979: 37).

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Summary and Conclusions

My dissertation examined different ways in which causation and responsibility intersect. I argued that some central and controversial features of causation are relevant to the understanding of certain moral notions and views. Structurally, the dissertation was organised into four self-contained but loosely interconnected chapters centred on how the causal and the moral overlap. The project was motivated by the presence in the literature of several aspects of causation that are underresearched in relation to ethical theory and are consequential in two respects: a) they dispute assumptions or features of widely accepted views of responsibility; b) they offer additional support to certain moral perspectives. The specific objective of the project was to investigate the extent to which an appeal to causation explains moral responsibility attributions and increases the strength of some specific moral views.

I started from the straightforward intuition that responsibility rests in important respects on causation. Since the only way an agent can make a difference in the world is through her causal powers, causation grounds responsibility in the sense that it determines, explains or makes true responsibility claims. This basic grounding relation is a recurrent theme throughout the dissertation.

In Chapter I, I examined the realist assumption that causation is an objective, extensional relation between space-time located relata. A realist stance about causation is meant to offer moral evaluation a naturalistic basis and make moral properties continuous with a naturalistic view of the world. The main contribution of the chapter was to show that such realist sympathies are problematic and by extension so are the views hoping to tie responsibility assessment to an objective, determinate relation in the world.154 I am persuaded by the thesis that a single concept of causation is at work in metaphysics, morality, and law (Moore 2009, Schaffer 2010) and confident that metaphysical debates on causation will shed light on and decide disputes about core moral and legal concepts. However, I argued that causal relations may fail to provide moral assessment with the naturalistic basis hoped for, which may ultimately prove to be an important limitation of an otherwise promising research programme. Indirectly, my conclusions contribute to the debates about the objective reality of causation, siding with the critics of causal realism (Hume 1739, Russell 1913, Wittgenstein 1922, Putnam

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1984, van Fraassen 1980, Blackburn 1993, Spohn 1993, Esfeld 2009). They also offer indirect support to the legal theorists who argue that causation in legal contexts differs from causation outside the law (Edgarton 1924, Malone 1956, Kelman 1987, Stapleton 2009) – although I am not convinced by this contention.

As the criticism of causal realism is an extensive topic, my strategy was to show that causation is based on incompatible intuitions and the best attempts to explain them fail to safeguard a robust sense of realism. I examined two such attempts: one defends a sense of objectivity through a reconciliation of our incompatible intuitions; the other aims to retain a different sense of objectivity within the structural equations framework (Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines 1993, Pearl 2000, Halpern and Hitchcock 2010, 2013). I argued that both describing and modelling of causal facts are affected by deep-rooted ambiguities, and as a result, causal realists need to retreat towards more modest commitments. In terms of contributions, the analysis of both attempts provided new insights. For instance, I indicated the ambiguous role played by the selection constraints involved in the description of causal facts (related to Strategy I) and showed that considerably more work is required to obtain systems of equations accurate and complete in their predictions and interventions (related to Strategy II). Although critical, my remarks about the justification of modelling choices are not meant to discredit the general value of the structural equations framework as a formal device allowing access to causal structure, but to invite further reflection on the adequate construction of apt causal models.

In Chapter II, I examined how the context sensitivity of causal claims impacts moral assessment in complex situations and argued that taking context sensitivity seriously generates important worries about ultimate moral responsibility. The context sensitivity of causal claims has received sustained attention in the literature (Mackie 1980, Lewis 1973, Bennett 1995, Hitchcock 1996, Woodward 2003, Maslen 2004, Menzies 2004, Swanson 2010, Schaffer 2012), but it has not been discussed in connection to the idea that moral responsibility claims rest on causal claims (Sartorio 2007, Driver 2008, Moore 2009). Bringing together the two bodies of work generates the main contribution of the chapter, which is a new, causation-based sceptical argument regarding the possibility of ultimate moral responsibility. Similar to other sceptical views (Strawson 1994, Rosen 2004, Sinnott-Armstrong 2006a), it is independent of whether determinism is true or not. Unlike these sceptical views, it does not claim that we cannot be morally responsible, in a fundamental sense, because of the

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way we are (our cognitive and social make-up), but because of the complexity of the world and of the way our causal knowledge is structured. Looking at the context sensitivity of causal claims one becomes aware of the complexity of causal determinants anteceding any outcome of interest, and the more one knows about the causal complexity anteceding a particular event, the more uncertain one becomes about what actually causes it. The more one becomes aware of the minute specificity of the causal world, the more one begins to realise how difficult it is to explain things fully.

In Chapter III, I examined the concept of higher-level causation as it appears in