The Metaphysical Bases of Liability: Commentary on Michael Moore’s Causation and Responsibility

Let me begin by saying how much I enjoyed Professor Michael Moore’s thick, rich, and learned book. I learned a great deal from reading it, and recommend it to anyone with an interest in any of the three topics it covers: moral responsibility, legal liability, and the metaphysics of causation. It covers such a wide breadth of terrain that even the most expert readers will learn a great deal from it. It is also very clearly and engagingly written. While it is possible to break the book roughly into sections corresponding to the three problem areas of ethics, legal theory, and metaphysics, the real strength of the book lies in the interaction between these different topics. As a philosopher interested in the metaphysics of causation, I will focus my discussion on the last section of the book, but a discussion of the metaphysics that is divorced from the applications to ethics or legal theory would be impossible. The last seven chapters of the book more or less stand alone, in the sense that one could start reading at chapter fourteen and have little difficulty following the discussion. Indeed, anyone who is not familiar with the current state of play in the philosophical literature on causation would get a solid overview from reading these chapters. For specialists in the theory of