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Omissions and Causal Explanations

In Francesca Castellani & Josef Quitterer (eds.), Agency and Causation in the Human Sciences. Mentis Verlag. pp. 155–167 (2007)

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  1. Why There Are No Frankfurt‐Style Omission Cases.Joseph Metz - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Frankfurt‐style action cases have been immensely influential in the free will and moral responsibility literatures because they arguably show that an agent can be morally responsible for a behavior despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. However, even among the philosophers who accept Frankfurt‐style action cases, there remains significant disagreement about whether also to accept Frankfurt‐style omission cases – cases in which an agent omits to do something, is unable to do otherwise, and is allegedly morally responsible for that omission. (...)
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  • Higher‐Order Omissions and the Stacked View of Agency.Joseph Metz - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):170-182.
    Omissions are puzzling, and theyraise myriad questions for many areas of philosophy. In contrast, omissions ofomissions are not usually taken to be very puzzling since they are oftenthought to just be a fancy way of describing ordinary “positive” events, statesof affairs, or actions. This paper contends that – as far as agency isconcerned – at least some omissions of omissions are omissions, not actions. First,this paper highlights how our actions are accompanied by many first-orderomissions - i.e., omissions to act – (...)
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  • Causalism Without Causation.Carolina Sartorio - 2023 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 18 (1):185-199.
    Moore’s Mechanical Choices is ripe with interesting ideas. Here I’ll focus on a particularly intriguing one that intersects with some aspects of my own work. It’s the suggestion that causalism should be amended in a way that doesn’t require causation. At first, this suggestion may sound absurd: How can causalism survive without causation, of all things? But I think that Moore is actually right about the main suggestion. I don’t think he’s right for the right reasons, but he’s still right (...)
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  • Preemptive Omissions.Joseph Metz - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (3):1117-1138.
    Philosophers have already recognized the importance of causal preemption involving “positive” events. First, preemption with positive events raises problems for counterfactual theories of causation. Second, theories of moral and legal responsibility rely heavily on the concept of causation, so accurately assessing responsibility in preemption cases requires correctly assessing their causal structure. However, philosophers have not discussed preemption involving “negative” events or omissions. This paper argues that cases of preemptive omissions exist and have important implications for theories of causation and for (...)
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  • The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy.Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.) - 2023 - Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
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  • Omissions and Their Effects.Martin Montminy - 2020 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (4):502-516.
    According to what I call theidentity view, omissions are actual events. For example, the nominal ‘Ali's non-jogging’ denotes whatever Ali is doing at the time she is said not to be jogging. Some have objected that omissions (and more generally absences) cannot be events, since the two do not have the same causal relations. I show how advocates of the identity view can offer a pragmatic account of the data the objection relies on.
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  • Omissions as Events and Actions.Kenneth Silver - 2018 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4 (1):33-48.
    We take ourselves to be able to omit to perform certain actions and to be at times responsible for these omissions. Moreover, omissions seem to have effects and to be manifestations of our agency. So, it is natural to think that omissions must be events. However, very few people writing on this topic have been willing to argue that omissions are events. Such a view is taken to face three significant challenges: (i) omissions are thought to be somehow problematically negative, (...)
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  • Normal Knowledge: Toward an Explanation-Based Theory of Knowledge.Andrew Peet & Eli Pitcovski - 2018 - Journal of Philosophy 115 (3):141-157.
    In this paper we argue that knowledge is characteristically safe true belief. We argue that an adequate approach to epistemic luck must not be indexed to methods of belief formation, but rather to explanations for belief. This shift is problematic for several prominent approaches to the theory of knowledge, including virtue reliabilism and proper functionalism (as normally conceived). The view that knowledge is characteristically safe true belief is better able to accommodate the shift in question.
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  • The good, the bad, and the timely: How temporal order and moral judgment influence causal selection.Kevin Reuter, Lara Kirfel, Raphael van Riel & Luca Barlassina - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5 (1336):1-10.
    Causal selection is the cognitive process through which one or more elements in a complex causal structure are singled out as actual causes of a certain effect. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we investigated the role of moral and temporal factors in causal selection. Our results are as follows. First, when presented with a temporal chain in which two human agents perform the same action one after the other, subjects tend to judge the later agent (...)
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  • The Metaphysics of Omissions.Sara Bernstein - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (3):208-218.
    Omissions – any events, actions, or things that do not occur – are central to numerous debates in causation and ethics. This article surveys views on what omissions are, whether they are causally efficacious, and how they ground moral responsibility.
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  • Absence Causation and a Liberal Theory of Causal Explanation.Zhiheng Tang - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (4):688-705.
    For the framework of event causation—i.e. the framework according to which causation is a relation between events—absences or omissions pose a problem. Absences, it is generally agreed, are not events; so, under the framework of event causation, they cannot be causally related. But, as a matter of fact, absences are often taken to be causes or effects. The problem of absence causation is thus how to make sense of causation that apparently involves absences as causes or effects. In an influential (...)
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  • Events.Roberto Casati & Achille C. Varzi - 2020 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    A critical survey of the main philosophical theories about events and event talk, organized in three main sections: (i) Events and Other Categories (Events vs. Objects; Events vs. Facts; Events vs. Properties; Events vs. Times); (ii) Types of Events (Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, and States; Static and Dynamic Events; Actions and Bodily Movements; Mental and Physical Events; Negative Events); (iii) Existence, Identity, and Indeterminacy.
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  • Mancanze, omissioni e descrizioni negative.Achille C. Varzi - 2006 - Rivista di Estetica 32 (2):109-127.
    Assuming that events form a genuine ontological category, shall we say that a good inventory of the world ought to include “negative” events—failures, omissions, things that didn’t happen—along with positive ones? I argue that we shouldn’t. Talk of non-occurring events is like talk of non-existing objects and should not be taken at face value. We often speak as though there were such things, but deep down we want our words to be interpreted in such a way as to avoid serious (...)
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  • Omissions and expectations: a new approach to the things we failed to do.Pascale Https:https://Orcidorg Willemsen - 2018 - Synthese 195 (4):1587-1614.
    Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell (...)
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  • On Perceiving Abs nces.Achille C. Varzi - 2022 - Gestalt Theory 44 (3):213-242.
    Can we really perceive absences, i.e., missing things? Sartre tells us that when he arrived late for his appointment at the café, he saw the absence of his friend Pierre. Is that really what he saw? Where was it, exactly? Why didn’t Sartre see the absence of other people who were not there? Why did other people who were there not see the absence of Pierre? The perception of absences gives rise to a host of conundrums and is constantly on (...)
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  • A regulative theory of basic intentional omissions.Philippe A. Lusson - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8399-8421.
    The folk picture of agency suggests that human beings have basic agency over some of their omissions. For example, someone may follow through on a decision never to support a political party without doing anything in order to make themselves omit. A number of features appear to signal their agency: the omission is not just called intentional, it is also seen as an achievement and explained in terms of the reasons for the decision. Some philosophers have tried to debunk the (...)
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  • An Ontological Account of the Action Theory of Economic Exchanges.Daniele Porello, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Tiago Prince Sales, Glenda C. M. Amaral & Nicola Guarino - 2020 - In Daniele Porello, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Tiago Prince Sales, Glenda C. M. Amaral & Nicola Guarino (eds.), Proceedings of 14th International Workshop on Value Modelling and Business Ontologies, Brussels, Belgium, January 16-17, 2020. pp. 157-169.
    In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in thedevelopment of ontologically well-founded conceptual models for Information Systems in areas such as Service Management, Accounting Information Systems and Financial Reporting. Economic exchanges are central phenomena in these areas. For this reason, they occupy a prominent position in modelling frameworks such as the REA (Resource-EventAction) ISO Standard as well as the FIBO (Financial Industry BusinessOntology). In this paper, we begin a well-founded ontological analysisof economic exchanges inspired by a recent ontological (...)
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  • Can We Hear Silence?Daniela Šterbáková - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):33-53.
    We can hear silence because silence, an absence of sound, causes our hearing of it. Advocating this position, Roy Sorensen puts to use his own theory of the direct perception of absences. Sorensen’s theory, which relies on two theories of perception, certainly has its appeal. However, it also has its problematic aspects. On my reading, a weak point of his theory is that it does not provide a criterion for the identification of what exactly we hear. By elaborating this objection (...)
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  • Counterfactuals and counterparts: defending a neo-Humean theory of causation.Neil McDonnell - 2015 - Dissertation, Macquarie University and University of Glasgow
    Whether there exist causal relations between guns firing and people dying, between pedals pressed and cars accelerating, or between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, is typically taken to be a mind-independent, objective, matter of fact. However, recent contributions to the literature on causation, in particular theories of contrastive causation and causal modelling, have undermined this central causal platitude by relativising causal facts to models or to interests. This thesis flies against the prevailing wind by arguing that we must pay (...)
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  • The Policy of Evidence.Giovanni Tuzet - 2021 - Theoria 87 (6):1418-1443.
    Epistemic and practical interests are often in conflict. This also occurs in institutional settings such as the legal one. Rule 407 of the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence is an example of that because it sacrifices some epistemic interests in favour of practical ones. It is the rule on subsequent remedial measures (SRM), which is mainly designed to answer a practical concern (reducing accidents) instead of the epistemic one of getting some evidence to find out whether the defendant was negligent (...)
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  • An ability-based theory of responsibility for collective omissions.Joseph Metz - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (8):2665-2685.
    Many important harms result in large part from our collective omissions, such as harms from our omissions to stop climate change and famines. Accounting for responsibility for collective omissions turns out to be particularly challenging. It is hard to see how an individual contributes anything to a collective omission to prevent harm if she couldn’t have made a difference to that harm on her own. Some groups are able to prevent such harms, but it is highly contentious whether groups can (...)
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  • The Talk I Was Supposed to Give….Achille C. Varzi - 2006 - In Andrea Bottani & Richard Davies (eds.), Modes of Existence: Papers in Ontology and Philosophical Logic. Ontos Verlag. pp. 131–152.
    Assuming that events form a genuine ontological category, shall we say that a good inventory of the world ought to include “negative” events—failures, omissions, things that didn’t happen—along with positive ones? I argue that we shouldn’t. Talk of non-occurring events is like talk of non-existing objects and should not be taken at face value. We often speak as though there were such things, but deep down we want our words to be interpreted in such a way as to avoid serious (...)
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