Causality

No matter how one thinks about causality, there are certain platitudes that this concept should satisfy. One of them may be called the difference platitude: causes make a difference—namely, things would be different if the causes of some effects were absent. This platitude is normally cast in two ways. We have already seen the first, the counterfactual way: if the cause had not been, the effect would not have been either. The other is a probabilistic way: causes raise the chances of their effects—namely, the probability that a certain event happens is higher if we take into account its cause than if we do not. This thought has led to the development of theories of probabilistic causality. We do rightly claim that smoking causes lung cancer, even though there is no regular association (or deterministic connection) between smoking and lung cancer. Some philosophers, most notably Patrick Suppes (1984) and Nancy Cartwright (1983), think that this is already a good argument against the view that causality is connected with invariable sequences or regularities. They then analyze causal claims in terms of probabilistic relations among magnitudes, capitalizing on the intuition that causes (mostly, but not invariably) raise the probabilities of their effects. Some think that there are good empirical reasons to jettison determinism (roughly, that each and every event has a fully sufficient set of causes) in favor of indeterminism (roughly, that there are genuinely chancy events). They then try to show that indeterminism and causality mix well, given the thought that a certain event can be caused to happen even though its cause made only a difference to its chance to happen. Interestingly, these ideas are extended to deterministic causality as well, with the prime thought being that an effect is deterministically caused to happen if its probability, given its cause, is unity.