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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The proximate cause of the husband's death was the wife's voluntary act, not the act of giving her the knives.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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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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