Topics Freedom

Question I have a question about causality solely when it comes to human behavior. Suppose I argue that the presence of oxygen on Earth was the cause of an office building on fire. It is certainly true that if there had been no oxygen on Earth there would have been no fire. It is also true that if there had been no arsonists or negligent persons, nor any flammable material, there would have been no fire. So is it true that when it is assumed that one of several necessary conditions was the sole and exclusive cause of an effect, then the reasoning is fallacious due to the possibility that humans might have free will which somehow shifts responsibility away from nature or scientific processes?

Accepted:
June 28, 2015

Comments

Assuming I understand it, the

Assuming I understand it, the reasoning you described is fallacious regardless of anything having to do with human free will. True, the presence of something combustible is a necessary (but fortunately not sufficient!) condition for the occurrence of a fire. But if I were to infer from that fact alone that the presence of something combustible was the sole cause of the fire, my inference would be laughably bad: indeed, onlookers would probably construe it as a joke. In any case, it would be evidence that I don't really possess the concept of causation.

I think that a related but different fallacy is often committed by those who say that the physical necessitation of a human action always makes the action unfree. It's the fallacy of assuming that the physical necessitation of an agent's action always bypasses the agent's deliberations. If causal determinism is true, then my decision to respond to your question was physically necessitated by events that predated my birth. But that doesn't imply that my deliberations -- my deciding which questions in this week's batch to consider answering, my deciding which of those to go ahead and answer, etc. -- played no role in my eventually answering your question. (It's not as if someone else decided that I would respond to your question.) On the contrary, according to causal determinism, my deliberations were essential links in the causal chain that led to my decision to respond: there's no reason at all to think that I would have responded to your question even if I had never deliberated about whether to respond to it.

I hope my answer engages with your question enough to be helpful.