A Good Cause

Session chaired by : Maryam Ebrahimi Dinani (Collège de France)

Abstract

I draw attention to an underappreciated virtue of Yablo's account of causation. It's the fact that the concept of cause that results from it is (in principle, at least) particularly well suited to play a role in grounding moral responsibility. This is for two reasons: (1) on Yablo's account, causes are said to have the right amount of specificity (they are quite specific, but not too specific); and (2) causes are also said to be the right kinds of difference-makers (e.g., the account allows us to distinguish between preemptors and switches). I discuss each of these features in turn, and then examine some questions that remain open, as well as some potential problems that require further attention.

Carolina Sartorio

Carolina Sartorio (PhD MIT, 2003) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. She works at the intersection of metaphysics, the philosophy of action, and moral theory. She is the author of Causation and Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-author (with Robert Kane) of Do We Have Free Will? A Debate (Routledge, 2021).