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    When coincidences intervene in a causal chain, earlier ac... — Carmelics
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    Home/Consequentialism
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    When coincidences intervene in a causal chain, earlier acts in that chain are not considered proximate causes of the resulting harm.

    Consequentialism
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.A coincidence (such as accidentally falling on the knives) intervenes in the causal chain between the gift and any resulting death.
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    • 2.Intervening coincidences, like intervening voluntary acts, sever proximate causal attribution to prior acts.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Hart and Honoré's 'Causation in the Law' (1959) distinguishes coincidences from interventions only when the coincidence is genuinely unforeseeable.
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    • 2.If a gift of knives foreseeably increases the probability of knife-related harm, the donor's causal contribution persists regardless of the specific intervening mechanism.
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    • 3.Proximate causation in consequentialist moral assessment tracks risk-imposition, not mechanistic contiguity, so foreseeable risk keeps earlier acts causally relevant.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Judith Jarvis Thomson's counterfactual analysis holds that causal relevance is preserved whenever removing the earlier act would eliminate the harm.
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    • 2.If the knives had not been gifted, the coincidental fall would have produced no knife-related death, making the gift a necessary condition for the harm.
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    • 3.A necessary condition for harm cannot be dismissed as non-proximate merely because an improbable intervening event was required to realize it.
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    Consequentialism

    Related

    A coincidence (such as accidentally falling on the knives) intervenes in the cau...A necessary condition for harm cannot be dismissed as non-proximate merely becau...Hart and Honoré's 'Causation in the Law' (1959) distinguishes coincidences from ...If a gift of knives foreseeably increases the probability of knife-related harm,...
    +4 moreShow less
    If the knives had not been gifted, the coincidental fall would have produced no ...Intervening coincidences, like intervening voluntary acts, sever proximate causa...Judith Jarvis Thomson's counterfactual analysis holds that causal relevance is p...Proximate causation in consequentialist moral assessment tracks risk-imposition,...

    Similar

    Intervening coincidences, like intervening voluntary acts, sever proxi...89%A voluntary act intervening in a causal chain breaks the chain of prox...84%A coincidence (such as accidentally falling on the knives) intervenes ...80%Evaluating only proximate consequences removes the need to predict non...76%

    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