Abstract
We typically judge that hasteners are causes of what they hasten, while delayers are not causes of what they delay. These judgements, I suggest, are sensitive to an underlying metaphysical distinction. To see this, we need to pay attention to a relation that I call positive security-dependence, where an event E security-depends positively on an earlier event C just in case E could more easily have failed to occur if C had not occurred. I suggest that we judge that an event C is a cause of a later event E only if E security-depends positively on C. This explains our causal judgements in typical cases of hastening and delaying as well as in atypical cases, where we judge that hasteners are not causes of what they hasten or that delayers are causes of what they delay.
Highlights
There is a puzzling asymmetry in our causal judgements about hasteners and delayers: we typically judge that hasteners are causes of what they hasten, while delayers are not causes of what they delay.1 This asymmetry is seen, for example, in our judgements about the following two cases: C
The forest fire would have been more secure at t, if the April rain had not occurred, i.e. the forest fire security-depends negatively on the April rain. These results show that there is a metaphysically significant difference between the way in which the May lightning is related to the forest fire in Hastened forest fire, and the way in which the April rain is related to the forest fire in Delayed forest fire: the forest fire in Hastened forest fire security-depends positively on the May lightning, while the forest fire in Delayed forest fire security-depends negatively on the April rain
The fact that the forest fire in Delayed forest fire security-depends negatively on the April rain explains our judgement that the April rain is not a cause of the forest fire—and that, rather, the forest burns in spite of the April rain
Summary
There is a puzzling asymmetry in our causal judgements about hasteners and delayers: we typically (though not always) judge that hasteners are causes of what they hasten, while delayers are not causes of what they delay. This asymmetry is seen, for example, in our judgements about the following two cases:. To capture the judgement that the April rain delays the forest fire, for example, we need to consider a fairly robust event: a forest fire that is essentially the burning of this particular forest, but whose precise time and manner of occurrence are not essential to it—it could have occurred in May or July instead of June, it could have started from a lightning strike hitting a different tree, it could have spread more slowly or rapidly, etc. The question arises: why do we judge, when we consider robust forest fire, that the hastening lightning strike in May is among its causes, while the delaying rain in April is not?
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