Causal Responsibility and Counterfactuals

Causal Responsibility and Counterfactuals

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in multiple agent contexts. We draw on the structura...

Causal Inference with Counterfactuals

Note we are not asking whether aspirin cures headaches in some more general sense, we wish to know whether this specific headache went away because of the decision to take aspirin. The only sensible way to answer this sort of question in the case of a specific event is to compare the outcome which you observed with the counterfactual outcome which you would have observed if you had chosen not t...

A causal theory of counterfactuals

" A Causal Theory of Counterfactuals " (forthcoming in Nous) I develop an account of counterfactual conditionals using " causal models " , and argue that this account is preferable to the currently standard account in terms of " similarity of possible worlds " due to David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker. I diagnose the attraction of counterfactual theories of causation, and argue that it is illusory.

Causal inference based on counterfactuals

BACKGROUND The counterfactual or potential outcome model has become increasingly standard for causal inference in epidemiological and medical studies. DISCUSSION This paper provides an overview on the counterfactual and related approaches. A variety of conceptual as well as practical issues when estimating causal effects are reviewed. These include causal interactions, imperfect experiments, ...

Counterfactuals, Causal Inference, and Historical Analysis