Abstract
Within the law, the traditional test for attributing causal responsibility is the counterfactual “but-for” test, which asks whether the injury complained of would have occurred but for the defendant’s wrongful act. This definition generally conforms to common intuitions regarding causation, but gives non-intuitive results in situations of overdetermination with two or more potential causes present. To handle such situations, Wright defined the NESS Test of causal contribution, described as a formalization of the concept underlying common intuitions of causal attribution. Halpern and Pearl provide a definition of actual causality in the mathematical language of structural models that yields counterintuitive results in certain scenarios. We present a new definition that appears to correct those problems and explain its greater conformity with the intuitions underlying the NESS test.
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Baldwin, R.A., Neufeld, E. (2004). The Structural Model Interpretation of the NESS Test. In: Tawfik, A.Y., Goodwin, S.D. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Canadian AI 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3060. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24840-8_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24840-8_21
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