Abstract

Causal pre-emption scenarios are problematic for the counterfactual framework of causation (CFC) because people judge an action to be the actual cause of an outcome although the outcome would have occurred anyway due to the action of a pre-empted alternative cause. We propose that commonsense causal questions typically probe specific events that actually happened as and how they did, and show that counterfactuals that probe specific events match selections of actual cause, and dissociations only occur with non-specific counterfactuals. In addition, the pre-empted action is often selected as the or an actual cause when it causes the pre-empting action (auto-pre-emption). Judgements of an action’s responsibility for the outcome track judgements of actual cause following the legal sine qua non principle. Agent reproach is also influenced by the agent's intention. The effects of causal dependency structure and counterfactual question type are robust across the intentionality of the pre-empting action and scenario content.

摘要

对于因果关系的反事实框架 (CFC) 而言，因果先发制人情景是有问题的，因为人们判断一个行为是结果的实际原因，尽管结果无论如何都会由于先发制人的替代原因的行为而发生。我们建议，常识性因果问题通常会探查实际发生的特定事件以及它们是如何发生的，并表明探查特定事件的反事实与实际原因的选择相匹配，并且分离仅发生在非特定的反事实中。此外，占先行动常常选择作为所述或一个实际原因时它会导致先发制人的动作（自动占先）。对诉讼结果责任的判断遵循法律规定的实际原因判断必要条件原则。代理人的责备也受到代理人意图的影响。因果依赖结构和反事实问题类型的影响在​​先发制人的行动和场景内容的意图中是稳健的。