Relevant Causes: Their Designation in Medicine and Law

Abstract

Kenneth Schaffner has given an important and useful treatment of the meaning of causality and the extent to which it is best understood through an inductive statistical or a statistical relevance view of causality. Etiological accounts in biomedicine do indeed refer back to gappy universals and employ both deductive and statistical reasonings. However, there is an important point made by Hart and Honoré, and acknowledged by Professor Schaffner, which must be underscored in order to understand the role of causal language in law and medicine. Schaffner acknowledges the dependence upon practical interests in Hart and Honoré’s concept of cause. Causes are abnormal conditions which are contrasted with conditions, which are the expected or proper state of affairs. As Schaffner notes, following Hart and Honoré,

A special laboratory from which oxygen is normally excluded suggests that the presence of oxygen will be construed as a cause of fire rather than a condition. Practical interests including controllability may also dictate which element is identified as the cause, i.e., what ‘makes the difference’ in a series of conditions ([2], pp. 2–3).