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    The proximate cause of the husband's death was the wife's... — Carmelics
    Home/Consequentialism
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    The proximate cause of the husband's death was the wife's voluntary act, not the act of giving her the knives.

    Consequentialism
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.A voluntary act intervening in a causal chain breaks the chain of proximate causation from earlier acts.
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    • 2.The wife voluntarily stabbed her husband after an unforeseeable psychological reaction to the gift.
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    • 3.The gift of knives was only a distal necessary condition, not a proximate cause, of the husband's death.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.H.L.A. Hart and Tony Honoré argue in 'Causation in the Law' that voluntary intervening acts only break causal chains when they are truly independent of conditions created by the prior actor.
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    • 2.If the knife-giver had reason to believe the wife was psychologically unstable, the 'unforeseeable' qualifier in P2 fails, preserving proximate causal responsibility.
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    • 3.Causal responsibility in law and morality is not binary between proximate and distal causes but admits of degrees of contribution that can sustain moral blame across the chain.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Judith Jarvis Thomson's work on acts and their consequences holds that providing the material means for harm, when that harm is a foreseeable type even if not specific instance, implicates the provider causally.
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    • 2.The doctrine of novus actus interveniens, as critically examined by Michael Moore in 'Causation and Responsibility,' applies only when the intervening act is wholly abnormal, not merely unexpected in its precise form.
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    Consequentialism

    Related

    A voluntary act intervening in a causal chain breaks the chain of proximate caus...Causal responsibility in law and morality is not binary between proximate and di...H.L.A. Hart and Tony Honoré argue in 'Causation in the Law' that voluntary inter...If the knife-giver had reason to believe the wife was psychologically unstable, ...
    +4 moreShow less
    Judith Jarvis Thomson's work on acts and their consequences holds that providing...The doctrine of novus actus interveniens, as critically examined by Michael Moor...The gift of knives was only a distal necessary condition, not a proximate cause,...The wife voluntarily stabbed her husband after an unforeseeable psychological re...

    Similar

    The gift of knives was only a distal necessary condition, not a proxim...91%The wife voluntarily stabbed her husband after an unforeseeable psycho...78%A coincidence (such as accidentally falling on the knives) intervenes ...71%Cutting the rope accelerates the victim's death but is not the act tha...69%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: consequentialism
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    One final solution to these epistemological problems deploys the legal notion of proximate cause. If consequentialists define consequences in terms of what is caused (unlike Sosa 1993), then which future events count as consequences is affected by which notion of causation is used to define consequences. Suppose I give a set of steak knives to a friend. Unforeseeably, when she opens my present, the decorative pattern on the knives somehow reminds her of something horrible that her husband did. T
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit