Causing Things and Doing Things

Abstract

One of Hart and Honoré’s central concerns in Causation in the Law is with the question of how it is we single out ‘the cause’ of some event or circumstance from the large range of conditions which is always requisite for the occurrence or obtaining of any effect.¹ In this chapter, I discuss not their answer to this question but rather a distinction they appear to draw, almost en passant, in the course of answering it — a distinction which has only rarely made much of an appearance in more recent philosophy of action. The distinction I have in mind is the distinction between what I call simple doings, on the one hand, and causings, on the other. Hart and Honoré seem to operate on the assumption that though there is causality to be discerned in the ontological structures underlying many instances of human agency, there is a class of basic action types — the simple doings, as I call them — in our understanding of which the notion of causality really does not figure at all. Speaking of how we go about assigning a given factor as ‘the cause’ of any particular harm, Hart and Honoré write as follows (I quote at length so that the main idea will be clear):

It is plain that, both in raising questions of this kind and in answering them, ordinary thought is powerfully influenced by the analogy between the straightforward cases of causal attribution (where the elements required for the production of harm in addition to the initiating action are all ‘normal’ conditions) and even simpler cases of responsibility which we do not ordinarily describe in causal language at all but by the simple transitive verbs of action.