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The Metaphysics of Omissions

Philosophy Compass 10 (3):208-218 (2015)

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  1. Preemptive Omissions.Joseph Metz - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (3):1117-1138.
    Philosophers have already recognized the importance of causal preemption involving “positive” events. First, preemption with positive events raises problems for counterfactual theories of causation. Second, theories of moral and legal responsibility rely heavily on the concept of causation, so accurately assessing responsibility in preemption cases requires correctly assessing their causal structure. However, philosophers have not discussed preemption involving “negative” events or omissions. This paper argues that cases of preemptive omissions exist and have important implications for theories of causation and for (...)
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  • Chains of Being: Infinite Regress, Circularity, and Metaphysical Explanation.Ross P. Cameron - 2022 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    'Chains of Being' argues that there can be infinite chains of dependence or grounding. Cameron also defends the view that there can be circular relations of ontological dependence or grounding, and uses these claims to explore issues in logic and ontology.
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  • The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy.Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.) - 2023 - Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
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  • Absence and Abnormality.Bram Vaassen - 2023 - Analysis 83 (1):98-106.
    Absences pose a dilemma for theories of causation. Allowing them to be causes seems to make theories too permissive (Lewis, 2000). Banning them from being causes seems to make theories too restrictive (Schaffer, 2000, 2004). An increasingly popular approach to this dilemma is to acknowledge that norms can affect which absences count as causes (e.g., Thomson, 2003; McGrath, 2005; Henne et al., 2017; Willemsen, 2018). In this article, I distinguish between two influential implementations of such ‘abnormality’ approaches and argue that (...)
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  • Environmental racism: A causal and historical account.Ariela Tubert - 2021 - Journal of Social Philosophy 52 (4):554-568.
    This paper develops a philosophical account of environmental racism and explains why having such an account is worthwhile. After reviewing some data points and common uses of the term linking environmental racism to the distribution of environmental burdens by race, I argue that environmental racism should be understood as referring to an unequal distribution caused by a history of racism. Environmental racism is thus analyzed in terms of two conditions: first, that environmental burdens and benefits be distributed according to race, (...)
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  • Collective inaction, omission, and non-action: when not acting is indeed on ‘us’.Anne Schwenkenbecher - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-19.
    The statement that we are currently failing to address some of humanity’s greatest challenges seems uncontroversial—we are not doing enough to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 °C and we are exposing vulnerable people to preventable diseases when failing to produce herd immunity. But what singles out such failings from all the things we did not do when all are unintended? Unlike their individualist counterparts, collective inaction and omission have not yet received much attention in the literature. collective (...)
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  • A good cause.Carolina Sartorio - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-16.
    I explore the question of how to ground the responsibility of agents in some tricky cases involving multiple agents who act in a non-coordinated fashion. These are scenarios where no single agent has the individual ability to make a difference to a harmful outcome, but where the outcome would have been avoided if they had all acted as they should have (thus, the agents collectively made a difference to the outcome’s occurrence). I argue that an important source of the problem (...)
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  • Omissions: The Constitution View Defended.David Palmer - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (3):739-756.
    Omissions are metaphysically puzzling: Are they something or are they nothing? This paper develops and defends the constitution view of omissions, according to which a correct analysis of a person’s omission has the form “S omitted to X by Y-ing,” where her Y-ing is what constitutes her not-X-ing. The paper explains why the constitution view should be preferred to other views of omissions and defends the view against objections.
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  • Moral Responsibility for Actions and Omissions: The Asymmetry Thesis Rejected.David Palmer & Yuanyuan Liu - 2021 - Erkenntnis 86 (5):1225-1237.
    There is an important contemporary debate in moral responsibility about whether the following asymmetry thesis is true: moral responsibility for actions does not require alternative possibilities but moral responsibility for omissions does. In this paper, we do two things. First, we consider and reject a recent argument against the asymmetry thesis, contending that the argument fails because it rests on a false view about the metaphysics of omissions. Second, we develop and defend a new argument against the asymmetry thesis, one (...)
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  • Omissions, Moral Luck, and Minding the (Epistemic) Gap.Joseph Metz - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (4):301-314.
    This paper warns of two threats to moral responsibility that arise when accounting for omissions, given some plausible assumptions about how abilities are related to responsibility. The first problem threatens the legitimacy of our being responsible by expanding the preexisting tension that luck famously raises for moral responsibility. The second threat to moral responsibility challenges the legitimacy of our practices of holding responsible. Holding others responsible for their omissions requires us to bridge an epistemic gap that does not arise when (...)
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  • Higher‐order omissions and the stacked view of agency.Joseph Metz - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):170-182.
    Omissions are puzzling, and theyraise myriad questions for many areas of philosophy. In contrast, omissions ofomissions are not usually taken to be very puzzling since they are oftenthought to just be a fancy way of describing ordinary “positive” events, statesof affairs, or actions. This paper contends that – as far as agency isconcerned – at least some omissions of omissions are omissions, not actions. First,this paper highlights how our actions are accompanied by many first-orderomissions - i.e., omissions to act – (...)
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  • Complicity, Collectives, and Killing in War.Seth Lazar - 2016 - Law and Philosophy 35 (4):365-389.
    Recent work on the ethics of war has struggled to simultaneously justify two central tenets of international law: the Permission to kill enemy combatants, and the Prohibition on targeting enemy noncombatants. Recently, just war theorists have turned to collectivist considerations as a way out of this problem. In this paper, I reject the argument that all and only unjust combatants are liable to be killed in virtue of their complicity in the wrongful war fought by their side, and that noncombatants (...)
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  • Norms Affect Prospective Causal Judgments.Paul Henne, Kevin O’Neill, Paul Bello, Sangeet Khemlani & Felipe De Brigard - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (1):e12931.
    People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm- conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—i.e., judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm- violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some future outcome. We show that the abnormal-selection effects (...)
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  • A counterfactual simulation model of causation by omission.Tobias Gerstenberg & Simon Stephan - 2021 - Cognition 216 (C):104842.
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  • Suspending Judgment is Something You Do.Lindsay Crawford - 2022 - Episteme 19 (4):561-577.
    What is it to suspend judgment about whether p? Much of the recent work on the nature and normative profile of suspending judgment aims to analyze it as a kind of doxastic attitude. On some of these accounts, suspending judgment about whether p partly consists in taking up a certain higher-order belief about one's deficient epistemic position with respect to whether p. On others, suspending judgment about whether p consists in taking up a sui generis attitude, one that takes the (...)
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  • Essential Structure for Causal Models.Jennifer McDonald - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper introduces and defends a new principle for when a structural equation model is apt for analyzing actual causation. Any such analysis in terms of these models has two components: a recipe for reading claims of actual causation off an apt model, and an articulation of what makes a model apt. The primary focus in the literature has been on the first component. But the problem of structural isomorphs has made the second especially pressing (Hall 2007; Hitchcock 2007a). Those (...)
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  • Doing Otherwise in a Deterministic World.Christian Loew - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    An influential version of the Consequence argument, the most famous argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism, goes as follows: For an agent to be able to do otherwise, there has to be a possible world with the same laws and the same past as her actual world in which she does otherwise. However, if the actual world is deterministic, there is no such world. Hence, no agent in a deterministic world can ever do otherwise. In this paper, (...)
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  • Causal after all : a model of mental causation for dualists.Bram Vaassen - 2019 - Dissertation, Umeå University
    In this dissertation, I develop and defend a model of causation that allows for dualist mental causation in worlds where the physical domain is physically complete. In Part I, I present the dualist ontology that will be assumed throughout the thesis and identify two challenges for models of mental causation within such an ontology: the exclusion worry and the common cause worry. I also argue that a proper response to these challenges requires a thoroughly lightweight account of causation, i.e. an (...)
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