Topics Freedom

Question I've been reading some philosophy stuff and I noticed that philosophers sometimes make a difference between "causing" and "bringing about". But I really can't understand what that difference is. My English dictionary says those verbs are synonyms. Could you help me?

Accepted:
December 9, 2008

Comments

I am not aware of a conventional way in which philosophers standardly draw this distinction. However, if a particular author distinguishes between "causing" and "bringing about", she might have in mind any one of several possible distinctions. Here are three candidates:

(i) causing versus being part of the causal background: The alarm clock's ringing causes me to awaken. That I am not deaf, that I was asleep to begin with, that there was air to conduct the sound from the alarm bell to my ear, etc., were all needed for me to awaken; without them, I would not have awakened when the alarm clock rang. So they, too, are causes -- at least, broadly speaking. But we might well want to privilege the alarm clock's ringing from among all of the other, background causes, and say that it was the alarm clock's ringing that brought about my awakening.

(ii) causing versus preventing a potential preventer. Dick, pilot of a bomber, bombs a city. His actions cause the city to be bombed. Jane, pilot of a fighter, shoots down an enemy plane that would otherwise have shot down Dick before Dick could have released his bomb. Jane, then, is also causally responsible for the bombing, broadly speaking. But we might want to distinguish Jane, who prevented a potential preventer of the bombing, from Dick, who actually dropped the bomb.

(iii) causing (intentionally) versus merely bringing about (which might be unintentional): A physician, intending to help a sick patient, gives the patient a drug. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the physician, the patient is allergic to the drug and dies as a result of the reaction coupled with the original illness. Let's even say that no physicians at the time knew that anyone was allergic to the drug; the given physician was not negligent in prescribing the medication. We could even stipulate that there was no other available course of treatment. Under these circumstances, we might be reluctant to say that the physician caused the patient to die; that might suggest that the physician deliberately brought about the patient's death or was somehow negligent. Rather, the physician brought about the patient's death, but inadvertently and without negligence.

There are a host of other subtle distinctions in the neighborhood as well. But these are the three that most readily come to mind.