Causation and Distinct Events

Abstract

If a specific event c can properly be called a cause of another specific event e, then c and e must be distinct events. This general principle seems agreed upon by virtually everyone who works on causation. Moreover, it seems generally agreed, or at least assumed, that ‘distinct’ is synonymous with ‘not identical’; indeed, the above principle is often put by saying that no event can be a cause of itself. Recent work¹ has suggested, however, that there are various pairs of events (such as ‘Cambridge events’) which are distinct in the sense of not being identical, but which are such that they cannot be causally related. Moreover, these pairs of events appear to be counterexamples to a number of the main approaches to defining causation. In this paper I want to suggest that all of these problematic cases can be dealt with in an intuitively straight-forward and appealing way. The principle that only distinct events can be causally related needs to be understood in a much broader way than the way in which it is usually understood. Specifically, I shall argue that this principle, to be fully adequate, requires a notion of distinctness of events which is broader than the notion of nonidentity. Once this broad notion of distinctness has been outlined, it will be seen that the troublesome cases are excluded by the principle in question.