How to Be Responsible for Something without Causing It*

condition that is realizable by different combinations of individual omissions by voters. For instance, consider an election with 100 potential voters, in which Bad gets 30 votes, Good gets 20, and the rest are abstentions. Suppose that all of the abstainers are like Lazy: they would have voted for Good if they had voted, but they abstained. Thus, given how things turned out, Good would have won if 11 of the abstainers had voted. It seems, then, that we want to blame the abstainers for the outcome of the election (as well as the people that voted for Bad). If my arguments in this paper are sound, we should say that none of the individual abstentions was a cause of the outcome. However, we could still argue that the fact that Good didn’t get 11 more votes from the pool of abstainers was a cause of the outcome (since, had at least 11 of the abstainers voted, Good would have won). There are different ways that the votes by the abstainers could have gone so that Good got 11 more votes from the abstainers pool. But never mind. If, as I have argued, causation is the vehicle of transmission of responsibility, to the extent that we could make each abstainer responsible for the fact that Good didn’t get 11 more votes from the abstainers pool, we could make each abstainer responsible for the outcome of the election. On this view, if a citizen abstains and the outcome of the election is bad, he is responsible for the outcome, not because he causes it, but because he is responsible for something that causes it. If so, the view that causation is the vehicle of responsibility could help us solve the voting problem.