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Causation in History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Mendel F. Cohen
Mendel F. Cohen
Affiliation:
University of Utah
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Extract

Following the practice of human beings everywhere historians distinguish the real or most significant cause(s) of an occurrence or state of affairs from ‘less important considerations’, ‘precipitating circumstances’, or ‘mere conditions’. I shall term claims that some phenomenon is most basically to be attributed to some one (or few) of the factors causally necessary for its occurrence attributive causal explanations or causal attributions and discusshere the extent to which moral convictions are constitutive of them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 62 , Issue 241 , July 1987 , pp. 341 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1987

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References

1 From Craven's The Coming of the Civil War, quoted in Thomas J., Pressly's Americans Interpret Their Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1962). I take this account of Craven's views from pp. 315–317 of Pressly.Google Scholar

2 Allen, Nevins, The Gateway to History (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1962), 228-229.Google Scholar

3 Pressly, 11-12.

4 Carl, Hempel, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, Journal of Philosophy 39 (1942Google Scholar), reprinted in20th Century Philosophy: The Analytic Tradition, Morris, Weitz (ed.) (New York: Free Press, 1966), 263.Google Scholar

5 Hempel, Carl, ‘Explanation in Science and History’, in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, R. G., Colodny (ed.) (University of Pittsburgh, 1962Google Scholar), reprinted in Philosophical Analysis and History, William H., Dray (ed.) (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1966), 98-99.Google Scholar

6 Hart, H. L. A. and Honoré, A. M., Causation in the Law (Oxford University Press, 1959), 11.Google Scholar

7 When an effect is over-determined by two or more distinct sufficient causal conditions the issue is more complex. In such cases parts of a given whole cause may be identified but the effect cannot be said to be due to any one of them. Suppose, for example, that a man is struck by a bullet to the heart just as he is crushed by a falling rock, both the bullet and the rock being enough to cause instant death. Although it might be determined that the strong wind that was blowing was a necessary condition of the bullet inflicting a mortal wound, the wind could not be said to be the cause of his death. Nor could the bullet.

8 John Stuart, Mill insists on this and adds that ‘each and every condition of the phenomenon may be taken in itsturn, and, with equal propriety in common parlance, but with equal impropriety in scientific discourse, as if it were the entire cause’(A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, Bk 111, Ch. V, Sec. 3).Google Scholar

9 Morris R., Cohen, The Meaning of Human History (La Salle: Open Court, 1947), 112. Cohen goes on to note that historians will not adhere to this ‘ rigorous conception of causality because of the pressure to tell a coherent story I and because they will see causal relationships ‘through a screen o human I values that gives the importance to some antecedents and relegates other to obscurity’.Google Scholar

10 See also examples arguing this point on pp. 72, 269 and 271.

11 Harris, John, ‘The Marxist Conception of Violence’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 3 (1973–1974), 200.Google Scholar

12 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr, ‘The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism’, Partisan Review 19 (1949), 971.Google Scholar

13 Robin, Winks, The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row, 1970), 273.Google Scholar

14 ‘The Blundering Generation’, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (1948), quoted in Pressly, p.306.Google Scholar

15 Pressly, p. 307.

16 Schlesinger, p. 978.

17 Pressly says that ‘the standard employed by Randall in discussing this question should be noted: the important point, ashe described it, was not whether the people of the 1860s considered the issues of their dayimportant enough to quarrel over, but whethertwentieth-century historians considered them that important. Criticswere to charge that this approach—judging the past by the ideas of the present … invalidated the “revisionist” understanding of history’ (p. 314). This would be correct if the claim were descriptive, but the moral critic is not required to judge an individual's behaviour in terms of the individual's own values. Those responsible for the creation of the Nazi death camps may have seen themselves to be implementing a necessary and desirable policy. Such a belief does not deflect condemnation of them for the establishment of the camps.

18 Schlesinger, p. 972.

19 Hart and Honoré, p. 292. See also pp. 31, 38ff., and 69ff.

20 See especially p. 59.

21 Harris, p. 206. My example comes from Harris, who develops his argument somewhat differently and contends that the causal imputation does not presuppose a prior moral evaluation.

22 Harris argues in this way.

23 See section 7, above.

24 In the course of the article cited above which argues that causal attributions are descriptive and that because human beings cause harm by their omissions they are as morally obligated to prevent such harm as they are torefrain from positively injuring others, Harris presents the weaker claim that ‘… it is the fact that unless we save him … [the drunk] will die that makes it our duty to save him’. The moral conviction that we have such a duty is all that is necessary for the claim that we caused the drunk's death by failing to move him from the puddle.

25 HH distinguish ‘factual’ or descriptive causal responsibility from normative responsibility and argue for the logical independence of the two (pp. 61ff.). If I am right the distinction must often be between explicitly normative responsibility and speciously descriptive causal responsibility.

26 Herbert, Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1965), 120.Google Scholar

27 I am indebted to the Research Committee of the University of Utah for the award of a Faculty Fellowship which facilitated the completion of the study of which this is a part.