Abstract
Do I cause global warming, climate change and their related harms when I go for a leisure drive with my gas-guzzling car? The current verdict seems to be that I do not; the emissions produced by my drive are much too insignificant to make a difference for the occurrence of global warming and its related harms. I argue that our verdict on this issue depends on what we mean by ‘causation’. If we for instance assume a simple counterfactual analysis of causation according to which ‘C causes E’ means ‘if C had not occurred, E would not have occurred’, we must conclude that a single drive does not cause global warming. However, this analysis of causation is well-known for giving counterintuitive results in some important cases. If we instead adopt Lewis’s (2000) analysis of causation, it turns out that it is indeterminate whether I cause global warming (etc.) when I go for a single drive. Still, in contexts where we seek to control or understand global warming, there is a pressure to adopt a more fragile view of this event. When we adopt such a view, it turns out that a single drive does cause global warming (etc.). This means that we cannot like Sinnott-Armstrong (2005) and Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong (2018) reject the idea that I should refrain from going for a leisure drive simply because such a drive does not cause global warming.
Highlights
Do I cause global warming, climate change and their related harms when I go for a leisure drive with my gas-guzzling car? The current verdict seems to be that I do not; the emissions produced by my drive are much too insignificant to make a difference for the occurrence of global warming and its related harms
I will rest with the conclusion that if we assume ELABORATED* and follow the guidance Lewis gives for deciding when a potential cause makes enough of a difference to count as a cause, it is indeterminate whether a single drive causes global warming
This is the sense of causation that Lewis aims at analysing, both in his (1973) BCausation^ and in his (2000) BCausation as Influence^, and this is the sense of causation the NESS-condition gives an analysis of. This raises the question of whether THE HARM PRINCIPLE refers to salient causes or to causes in the broad sense. If it refers to causation in the broad sense, it might entail that we have a moral obligation not to go for a leisure drive even if Sinnott-Armstrong (2005) would be correct in claiming that we have no reason to identify this drive as a salient cause of global warming
Summary
SIMPLE is well known for giving counter-intuitive results in cases of pre-emption and (symmetric) overdetermination (cf. Hart and Honoré 1985; Lewis 2000; Wright 1985). BOTTLE SHATTERING: Billy and Suzy throw rocks at a bottle. Since SIMPLE gives problematic results in some important cases of pre-emption and overdetermination, we should not use this principle to evaluate alleged causes of global warming and climate change. These events are of the problematic kind. That SIMPLE entails that Suzy did not cause the bottle to shatter is usually not taken as a sign that she did not cause the bottle to shatter. We should pause and ask ourselves what the relevant notion of causation is.
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