Event Causation and Agent Causation

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter begins by characterizing event causation and agent causation, and then looks at strategies for attempting to reduce one of these species of causation to the other. In the end, arguments are presented in favour of the view that talk in terms of event causation — to the extent that it should strictly be countenanced at all — is best understood as elliptical for talk in terms of agent causation, although only where the word ‘agent’ is very broadly construed, rather than being confined in its application to the much narrower class of rational agents, ourselves included.