Broken brakes and dreaming drivers
- Recently, there has been an increased interest in employing model-based definitions of actual causation in legal inquiry. The formal precision of such approaches promises to be an improvement over more traditional approaches. Yet model-based approaches are viable only if suitable models of legal cases can be provided, and providing such models is sometimes difficult. I argue that causal-model-based definitions benefit legal inquiry in an indirect way. They make explicit the causal assumptions that need to be made plausible to defend a particular claim of actual causation. My argument concerns the analysis of legal cases involving a combination of double prevention and causal redundancy. I show that discussions among legal theorists about such cases sometimes suffer from ambiguous assumptions about the causal structure. My account illustrates that causal models can act as a heuristic tool for clarifying such assumptions, and that causal models provide a framework for more accurate analyses of legal cases involving complex causal structure.
| Author: | Enno FischerORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hbz:294-108970 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-023-00563-4 |
| Parent Title (English): | European journal for philosophy of science |
| Subtitle (English): | the heuristic value of causal models in the law |
| Publisher: | Springer |
| Place of publication: | Berlin |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2024/02/19 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2024/01/25 |
| Publishing Institution: | Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsbibliothek |
| Tag: | Actual causation; Causal models; Causal redundancy; Double prevention; Legal cases |
| Volume: | 14 |
| Issue: | Article 5 |
| First Page: | 5-1 |
| Last Page: | 5-20 |
| Note: | Dieser Beitrag ist auf Grund des DEAL-Springer-Vertrages frei zugänglich. |
| Institutes/Facilities: | Institut für Philosophie I |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | Philosophie und Psychologie / Philosophie |
| open_access (DINI-Set): | open_access |
| faculties: | Fakultät für Philosophie und Erziehungswissenschaft |
| Licence (English): |  Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 - Attribution 4.0 International |
