JOHANNES PERSSON

CAUSE, EFFECT, AND FAKE CAUSATION

ABSTRACT. The possibility of apparently negative causation has been discussed in a

number of recent works on causation, but the discussion has suffered from being scattered.
In this paper, the problem of apparently negative causation and its attempted solutions are
examined in more detail. I discuss and discard three attempts that have been suggested
in the literature. My conclusion is negative: Negative causation shows that the traditional
cause&effect view is inadequate. A more unified causal perspective is needed.

1. THE CAUSE & EFFECT VIEW AND ITS TWO HUMEAN ROOTS

Traditionally causation theories often are cause&effect views, i.e., they

claim that when c causes e or E because C is true, a cause and an effect
exist. The Humean view of causation is a particularly important source,
which can be put roughly as follows:
HUMEAN1
One particular object or object-involving event of type A call it A1 is truly said to
be the cause of another particular object or object-involving event of type B call it B1
just in case A1 is prior to and spatio-temporally contiguous to B1, and all objects or
event-involving events of type A are prior to and spatio-temporally contiguous to objects
or object-involving events of type B. (Strawson 1989, 89)

HUMEAN1 accounts are not the only cause&effect views. We may define
a cause to be an object followed by another, and where all the objects,
similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the other, Hume
first contributes to HUMEAN1 but then continues: Or, in other words,
where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed
(Hume 1777/1902, Section VII). The counterfactual view is the second
main version of the cause&effect view:
HUMEAN2
The event E1 depends causally on the event C1 iff E1 occurs depends counterfactually
on C1 occurs. (Compare Lewis 1973a)

A number of contemporary instances of HUMEAN1 and HUMEAN2

could be found, but to identify them is not the purpose of this paper;
instead I will take an interest in their limitations. Cause&effect views face
a number of intriguing difficulties, and the following problem of negative

Synthese 131: 129143, 2002.

2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
130 JOHANNES PERSSON

causation is particularly interesting. It is central to D. H. Mellors The

Facts of Causation; it seems recently to have motivated David Lewis to
change his earlier views (see Lewis 1999); and Phil Dowe employs it to
suggest a distinction between genuine causation and what I will call
fake causation (Dowe 1999). The impact of the problem of negative
causation requires a more thorough examination than it has so far received.
The conclusion in this paper partly resembles Mellors: The cause&effect
view cannot proceed by admitting negative causes, and negative causation
indeed shows that the cause&effect view is inadequate. But it adds to
the previous discussion both by arguing that neither Armstrongs (1978)
appeal to ignorance nor Dowes acceptance of fake causation can dissolve
the problem. A unified account treating genuine and fake causation alike
is needed, but such an account cannot be provided within the cause&effect
perspective.

2. BEYOND THE CAUSE & EFFECT APPROACH : PREVENTION AND

OMISSIONS

[T]he same thing is the cause of contrary results. For that which by its presence brings
about one result is sometimes blamed for bringing about the contrary by its absence. Thus
we ascribe the wreck of a ship to the absence of the pilot whose presence was the cause of
its safety. (Aristotle 1985, II.3, 333)

The cause&effect view doesnt get unconditional support from our in-
tuitions. Looking at how we ordinarily think about causation, causation
with causes and effects does not exhaust the possibilities. Quite often
we report instances of causation without both causes and effects. Where
causes seem to be lacking, we typically speak of omissions. In some cases
a phenomenon takes place because a hindrance is lacking: The fathers
inattention was the cause of the childs accident. Where effects seem to
be lacking, we often speak of prevention. In some cases a phenomenon
does not occur because of the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of another:
We didnt go to Lund that morning because it was snowing a lot. This
is bad news for the cause&effect view. It accounts for causation by saying
that causal reports are made true partly by their causes and effects, but
according to our experience this story doesnt fit all causal facts.
One may object to this way of framing the problem. It is notoriously
difficult to argue from intuitions and everyday experiences. The above
introduction to the problem of negative causation seems ineffective. Is it
really worthy of attention?
Yes. First, it can be noted that those advocates of the cause&effect view
who have approached the problem concerning negative causal reports have
 CAUSE, EFFECT, AND FAKE CAUSATION 131

been hesitant to argue against the assumption that we normally think and
speak about negative causation. Unlike many other areas, there seem to
be few contradictory intuitions at this level of debate. Reports of negat-
ive causation do much of the same work as positive reports. Second,
a problem with intuitions and experiences in general, and causal ones in
this case, is that they may be too infected by previous and contemporary
theorising to be of any use. But here that risk is low. The cause&effect
paradigm has been very influential, and should have made us suspicious
of causation without causes and effects. Still such causation exists in our
thoughts. These causal intuitions are not theory-laden but in conflict with
theory. Though often sceptical about what descriptive metaphysics can
tell us about the world, I think this might be an exception.
Before we go on it should be noted that some philosophers claim that
at a more reflective level there is a difference in our intuitions concerning
negative and positive causal reports. Dowe speaks of such an intuition of
difference:
I claim that we can recognise, on reflection, that certain cases of prevention or omission
[. . . ] are not really cases of genuine causation. Call this the intuition of difference. We
also feel, however, that the mistake of treating them as if they were causation doesnt
matter for practical purposes. (Dowe 1999, 3)

Dowe correctly notices that in addition to his intuitions from reflection,

several philosophical debates on related issues (such as passive/active eu-
thanasia) seem to strengthen the case for claiming that there are some
differences in our reflected intuitions about positive and negative causal
reports. Given the influence of the cause&effect view, however, the results
of these observations are much less surprising, and lend less support to the
view that negative causal reports are not genuine causal reports than our
(more immediate) intuitions to the contrary.
I assume in the following that our negative and positive causal thoughts
are sufficiently similar to make it necessary for the advocates of the
cause&effect view to somehow account for this similarity. That is, the
following discussion is not conducted under the presumption that the only
acceptable solution is to make negative cases as causal as positive ones,
although that is the position I in fact advocate. At this point it is an open
question whether an approach that accounts for negative causation in other
terms is viable. In the next sections I discuss and discard three accounts of
this similarity from within the cause&effect perspective.
132 JOHANNES PERSSON

3. FIRST ATTEMPT: EVEN IF WE HAVEN T NOTICED , THERE IS

ALWAYS SOMETHING POSITIVE GOING ON IN THE NEGATIVE
CASES

The reason why seemingly negative cases are reported as causal, it is some-
times claimed, is that there is always some positive causation going on in
them. In his 1978 book, Armstrong defends such a view:
[W]hen we reflect a little on such cases, we are very ready to admit that the actual causal
processes involved proceed solely in virtue of the (positive) properties of the situation. To
say that the lack of water caused his death reflects not a metaphysic of the causal efficacy
of absences but merely ignorance. Certain (positive) processes were going on in his body,
processes which, in absence of water, resulted in a physiological condition in virtue of
which the predicate dead applied to his body. (Armstrong 1978, 44)

In all our previous examples there might easily be hidden ongoing pro-
cesses triggered by or resulting in something positive. The childs
desire to catch the balloon might be what, in a positive sense, caused
the accident (not the fathers inattention). The heavy snowfall might have
positively caused our staying in Malm (rather than our not-going to
Lund). In the quotation, Armstrong seems to claim that this is always the
case.
An attractive feature of this suggestion is that it would be open to
all cause&effect views. Cause&effect views are put together in order to
handle positive causation, and if they are successful at this, the alleged
fact that every instance of negative causation is nothing but a positive
instance in disguise would make them successful also in handling negative
causation.
Unfortunately, the existence of possibly unrecognised positive entities
in the causal relation is not enough in order to handle the problem of negat-
ive causation. There are at least two reasons for this. To begin with, positive
entities in a causal process cannot do anything to prove that the negative
ones do not count. Regardless of whether positive causes in a process that
was previously reported as an omission (or a prevention) are discovered, it
can rightfully still be reported as an omission or a prevention. Even if pos-
itive causes have entered the process, the previously recognised absences
might still be causally linked. It would simply be to beg the question if one
answered that the negative ones can be excluded since causation has to be
a relation between concrete entities. This problem cannot easily be solved,
one intriguing difficulty being that the positive events that might make
negative reports true are not likely to stand in the same kinds of causal
relations as the original report asserted. One attempt to circumvent the
objection would be to claim that we have misrepresented the first attempt.
 CAUSE, EFFECT, AND FAKE CAUSATION 133

It is not launched as an alleged proof of the non-existence of negative

causation; what is established is merely the possibility of genuine caus-
ation between positives in scenarios that look negative from the present
epistemic perspective. Indeed, such a claim would be consistent with our
initial characterisation of a cause&effect view: when c causes e or E
because C is true, a cause and an effect exist does not entail that the cause
and effect are c and e. I have no quarrel with such a reformulation, but then
it is far too weak for the present purposes. Unless the relation between pos-
itive and negative causation is explained, we have done nothing to handle
the problem of negative causation.
Second, on closer examination a lot of positive causation turns out to
involve negative entities. Here is an example originated by Michael Mc-
Dermott and Phil Dowe: Chopping off someones head causes death (if
anything causes anything), but does so as a prevention, since chopping
off the head prevents processes which would have caused the person to
continue living. And as in this example so in general. For all we know,
there might be as many hidden omissions and cases of prevention as there
are hidden positive parts of the causal process.

4. SECOND ATTEMPT: NEGATIVE ENTITIES CAN ALSO BE CAUSES

AND EFFECTS

Because of the failure of the first attempt one might be tempted to divide
the causal world into a positive and a negative hemisphere. The positive
half would have objects with ordinary properties, hitting each other as bil-
liard balls do. The negative half would be inhabited by negative stuff, such
as omissions, absences and not-goings-to-Lund. Both hemispheres, and
their intersection, would share the same kinds of causal relations. In that
way we would not much have to change our traditional view of causation.
The way this idea promises to handle negative causation is also at-
tractive. If omissions and cases of prevention are negative entities, and if
negative entities behave in much the same way as positive causal entities
do, we do not even have to speak of disguises in order to explain why
negative causal reports are causal.
A temporary drawback of the suggestion is that few of the existing
theories of causation currently accept negative relata. One of the prominent
HUMEAN2 views, Lewiss earlier counterfactual account of causation,
has difficulty with negative events because of their highly disjunctive char-
acter (see Lewis 1986, 189193, and Dowe 1999), and Armstrong does
not accept negative facts at all (Armstrong 1997, 134135). However,
some theories, such as Suppess HUMEAN1 inspired probabilistic theory
134 JOHANNES PERSSON

of causation (Suppes 1970) doesnt explicitly rule out the possibility of

negative relata of causation. Nor do the manipulability views of Gasking
and von Wright but then it is hardly correct to understand manipulability
in terms of causes and effects in the first place.

4.1. Against negative properties

The real and permanent difficulty is that the above story can be successful
only if negative causes and effects exist, and the kinds of entities usually
thought of as causal relata are problematic to conceive of as negative. First,
there is Ramseys argument against complex properties:
[T]his theory will hold that there are three closely related propositions; one asserts that the
relation R holds between the terms a and b, the second asserts the possession by a of the
complex property of having R to b, while the third asserts that b has the complex property
that a has R to it. These must be three different propositions because they have different
sets of constituents, and yet they are not three propositions, but one proposition, for they
all say the same thing, namely that a has R to b. So the theory of complex universals
is responsible for an incomprehensible trinity, as senseless as that of theology. (Ramsey
1925/1954, 118)

If valid this argument has a substantial impact on several attempts to

build negative relata of causation. Consider for instance Kims view of
events (Kim 1973, 1980), according to which events are instantiations of
a property at a time by a substance. Following Kim, events cannot be
negative unless properties can be negative, and according to Ramsey they
cannot. Now, the argument Ramsey offers has been disputed. A modern
formulation of it (Mellor 1991) was recently attacked by Oliver (1992)
and Botterell (1998). It is clear that the RamseyMellor argument contains
several implicit assumptions. According to the argument, the two-place re-
lation (R) and the two one-place relational properties (aR) and (Rb) would
constitute three facts that couldnt be identical because the constitutents
differed. To see that the constituents would differ is not difficult one is
a relation, the other a property, etc. So granted that these constituents by
themselves can constitute three facts, we are led to compare this situation
with the holy trinity (satisfactory perhaps for men of the church but not for
Cambridge philosophers). What happens if we question this assumption?
Perhaps a Ramsey-fact consists of six constituents: a, b, R, aR, Rb, and
aRb? Similarly, in Mellors version of the argument:
[S]uppose there are, i.e., that there are properties U , V , and W such that P = U , P Q =
V and P &Q = W . Then U a and P a, for example, are the very same state of affairs. But
they cant be, because they have different constituents: the first containing U but not P ,
the second P but not U . And similarly for V a and P a Qa, and for W a and P a&Qa. So
there are no such properties as U , V and W which is not of course to deny the existence
of the predicates U , V and W . (Mellor 1991, 179)
 CAUSE, EFFECT, AND FAKE CAUSATION 135

What says that a single Mellor-fact does not consist of a, P , , P , P a,

and P a? There are probably good reasons why this cannot be the case.
Wouldnt it, for instance, be very problematic to have both P and P as
properties in the same fact? The argument deserves further discussion, but
the position that in the meantime seems to be left open for the believer
in complex properties is not attractive. Few who believe in the ontolo-
gical importance of properties and facts would be inclined to accept such
multiple counting. In practice, the RamseyMellor argument is more com-
pelling than the recent critique of it suggests, and it seems in these causal
circumstances to be a powerful argument against negative properties.
Not all views of events and facts utilise explicitly the idea that events
and facts are simply instantiations of properties, so it is interesting to see
that there are both independent and related problems with negative objects,
events, and facts.

4.2. Against negative objects and events

Mellor has employed another Ramsey-inspired argument against negative
objects. Let us assume that there is a non-king of Italy making Italy has
no king true. Then, since it is an indisputable fact that Italy has no king
entails Italy has no unmarried king the existence of the non-king must
guarantee this. It seems that the only way for him to do so is by being
unmarried. But of course, Italy has no king also entails Italy has no
married king and the non-king can hardly be both married and unmarried,
and can therefore not exist in the first place. A slight modification makes
the argument apply to negative events as well. Let us start by assuming
that Don does not die because he does not fall is a true negative causal
report. Then Don does not die and Don does not fall have to be true.
If we believe that events are the relata of causation, Don does not die
can be assumed to be made true by a negative event. But, as we saw above,
Don does not die entails Don does not die painfully and Don does not
die painlessly, and the event cannot be both painful and painless, so we
were wrong in assuming the negative event; hence the cause&effect view
cannot handle the situation in this way.
There is a recent critique of this argument also. Dorothy Edging-
ton (1997) and Paul Noordhof (1998) both criticised the argument in
their reviews of Mellors The Facts of Causation. It is instructive to see
why their objections are inadequate in this context. Noordhofs objec-
tion presupposes a firm distinction between positive and negative causal
reports:
In abstract, my claim is that it is not legitimate to suggest that if f causes g is a causal
statement relating positive events, then what makes not-f cause not-g are two negative
136 JOHANNES PERSSON

events: non-occurrence of f and non-occurrence of g. Rather there are various positive

events each of which given the laws which hold would make the negative causal
statement true and one of which, in fact, did make it true in the circumstances. (Noordhof
1998, 858)

What Noordhof does is simply to deny the negative event-approach (and to

favour instead the first attempt in Section 3), but this cannot be an objection
to Mellors argument, which supposedly shows that negative effects do not
exist. Hence it is irrelevant to the evaluation of the second attempt. In these
circumstances, Edgingtons objection is not more to the point:

If anyone did wish to maintain that Don does not die painlessly required the existence of
an event, it would have to be an event which is either a non-death, or a death which is not
painless. The fallacy is a failure to distinguish the scope of negation: non-(painless death)
as opposed to painless (non-death). (Edgington 1997, 422)

Edgington points out that we can interpret Don does not die painlessly
in more ways than Mellor assumes in his argument. There is for instance
an additional event-existence interpretation, namely that there is a death
which does not have a certain property, but Mellor does not consider that
possibility. Since it wouldnt be a negative event Mellor is mistaken in
assuming that, if an event was entailed by Don does not die painlessly it
would be negative. If this really is Edgingtons objection it seems to based
on a misrepresentation. Mellor starts by assuming both that Don does not
die because he does not fall and that (D) Don does not die are true, and
then he examines whether event-causation can make sense of this case. But
Don does not die is not compatible with the existence of a death of Don,
only with a non-death of him. There is no room for Edgingtons kind of
manoeuvre. What we can do is (a) to go for Noordhofs suggestion, (b) to
conclude with Mellor that Don does not die because he does not fall does
not report causation between particulars, or (c) to resist the claim that if
there is a negative event that makes Don does not die true, Don does not
die painlessly follows from it. Since (a) gives up the second attempt, and
(b) gives up the first and the second attempt, it is only (c) that remains as a
possibility within the second attempt. But it is a rather desperate option. To
accept it would imply that language cannot at all guide us in metaphysical
inquiry.
Now, few believe in negative objects and proponents of events as causal
relata seldom conceive of them in the Davidsonian way that Mellors
argument presupposes. Furthermore, there are still only few accounts of
causation that take causes and effects to be properties, so it is not likely
that Ramseys and Mellors arguments will play the most salient role in a
debate over the second suggestion.
 CAUSE, EFFECT, AND FAKE CAUSATION 137

4.3. Against negative facts

I believe the position is different with regard to facts and events that are
similar in nature to facts (for instance, both Kims and Lewiss events are
more similar to facts than to objects). And negative facts do seem more
credible than other negative stuff.
There are three kinds of arguments that show why negative facts nev-
ertheless are problematic. Two of them relate facts to their constituents
constituents that we have already seen cannot be negative, and the first
builds on the observation in Persson and Sahlin (1999), that an argument
structurally similar to the above two can be used against negative facts. We
seem to be able to mimic Mellors argument against negative events: It is
an undeniable fact that (S) Don does not die entails both (S1) Don does
not die because he smokes in bed, and (S2) Don does not die because he
drinks whisky in his hotel room. Let us now assume that there are negative
facts, and furthermore that such a negative fact (F) makes S true. Since in
these circumstances we take because to be a causal connective, and since
Don in fact drank whisky and smoked in bed, S1 and S2 seem to reveal that
F has the most diverse causes. Since F clearly does not have these causes,
it does not exist in the first place. The supposed problem here, as above, is
that while we cannot deny that the entailments between S, S1 and S2 hold,
after accepting F we can no longer employ the explanation why we think
so (in this case, probably, that on any theory of causation E because C
entails C and E, so by modus tollens we have that E entails (E
because C). If we are dealing with truly negative facts, there is no easy
transition from E via E).
The second argument focuses on the constituents of facts. It is often
claimed that a fact is structured in some way. According to the traditional
understanding of atomic facts, for example, these have both object- and
property-constituents. I favour the trope-view of facts below, but it is valu-
able to see that negative facts are in trouble also on the traditional view.
Some causal reports, like Mellors: Kims use of contraception causes
her to have no children, might be thought to report a relation between
two facts, one positive (Kim uses contraception) and one negative (Kim
has no children). Examining the supposed negative fact, we see that the
predicate has no children can be taken to apply to Kim because she has
a negative property of having no children. But since there are no negative
properties this way of having negative facts wont work. What we mean
when we report such things about Kim is that certain facts about Kim do
not exist. As Mellor remarks, has no children applies to Kim simply
because no particulars of a certain kind children of Kim exist (Mellor
138 JOHANNES PERSSON

1995, 162). On the traditional view facts are not negative, but negative
truths sometimes hold because no such facts exists.
A related reason for rejecting negative facts emerges when facts are
conceived of as tropes, or property instances (for a defence of such views
see Bacon 1995 and Persson 2000). If facts are tropes, the existence of neg-
ative facts would require negative tropes, i.e., negative property instances.
But if negative property instances do not exist, a case that for instance
can be argued for along Ramseys lines, there can be no negative facts
either. On the trope-view of facts it seems even clearer that there can be no
negative facts.
If these and similar arguments are successful, we can show that there
are no negatives in the world. And so, in a sense, no positives either. The
world is blind to the positive/negative distinction, and the second attempt
fails both in that few existing theories of causation allow negative relata
and in that there are powerful arguments against the existence of the kind
of negative properties, objects, events and facts, that we would need in
order to have this kind of negative causation.

5. THIRD ATTEMPT: THERE IS GENUINE AND THERE IS FAKE

CAUSATION

There appears to be one more way out for the advocate of the cause&effect
view. It is sometimes claimed that we have causation, and then we have
something that resembles causation, but really is not, since it does not in-
volve concrete causes and effects. This third attempt distinguishes between
genuine and fake causation. It differs from the previous attempts in not
trying to give a fully causal account of negative causation. An advocate of
the third attempt may say: You were wrong about the domain of the causal
world. It is narrower than you expected. Much narrower, we may add, be-
cause there are many more true negative reports than positive ones. Though
not faithful to our immediate intuitions, I think it is the cause&effect theor-
ists only remaining alternative. If it is also unsatisfactory, as I argue it is,
we have a strong indication that there is something about the cause&effect
view itself that is deeply problematic.
What would fake causation be like? I think the natural idea is embedded
already in Armstrongs attempt: Certain (positive) processes were going
on in his body, processes which, in absence of water, resulted in a physiolo-
gical condition in virtue of which the predicate dead applied to his body
(Armstrong 1978, 44). Armstrongs idea seems to be that the process is the
cause, not the absence. This doesnt immediately solve the problem since
the absence may now be thought to be a cause of the process instead. How
 CAUSE, EFFECT, AND FAKE CAUSATION 139

but causally can we interpret processes which in absence of water . . . ?

There are two options: one can understand it as absence of water caused
processes . . . , or one can understand it counterfactually: had there been
water these processes would not . . . (Persson 1997, 55). The first, causal,
reading cannot be utilised within the third attempt. It would simply turn
the attempt into the previous second attempt. The idea was to avoid causal
links in negative causal reports, and then one cannot import them at the
next level of analysis. That leaves us with the second reading, to understand
negative reports as counterfactual, but yet non-causal, reports.
This is also Dowes idea. He first tells us to distinguish between caus-
ation and causation (my fake causation) and then he gives the following
account:
Not-A fake-caused B if
1. B occurred and A did not, and there occurred an x such that
2. x caused B, and
3. if A had occurred then there would have been a causal relation between A and the
process due to x. (Dowe 1999, 15)

According to Dowe, fake causation claims are counterfactual claims about

genuine causation.
An important question has to do with the stuff in the world that the
counterfactual expression in (3) needs in order to be correct. Counterfac-
tual accounts of genuine causation have to order possible worlds in a way
that makes the right causal reports come out true. But what makes one
possible world closer to the actual world than another? It should probably
be similarity-relations that count, but as Lewis admits, similarity can give
rise to many different orderings:
The truth conditions for counterfactuals are fixed only within rough limits; like the relative
importance of respects of comparison that underlie the comparative similarity of worlds,
they are a highly volatile matter, varying with every shift of context or interest. (Lewis
1973b, 92)

I cannot convince myself that it is possible to order worlds in a less volatile

way unless one decides to keep some properties in the worlds fixed. Only
if, for instance, we decide to compare worlds where the causal laws are
the same is it possible to judge whether a certain counterfactual is true.
But since the notion of a law or another causal property is then already
assumed, counterfactual accounts do not tell us all there is to know about
the nature of causation. The fake causation account that Dowe suggests
seems to inherit some of these problems. Let us illustrate the situation with
Not-A fake-caused B. According to the above account this is roughly
a counterfactual expression about A interferes with B. If the previous
140 JOHANNES PERSSON

claim about counterfactual theories of causation is correct, fake causation

claims like this also depend on us only considering worlds where some-
thing is kept fixed. Presumably, one thing that needs to be fixed is a law,
and entities of A-kind prevent entities of B-kind seems to be a reasonable
candidate. It is of course not the only possibility, but the counterfactual
element in Dowes account of fake causation seems to require that we
assume some such constancy of fake-causal properties through possible
worlds.
Depending on exactly what needs to be kept fixed, counterfactual the-
ories of causation and fake causation tell us more or less about what
causation and fake causation is. They never tell the complete story, though,
and often they seem to implicitly rely on some more fundamental concept
of causation or law. These brief remarks are only intended to show the need
for a clear account of what in these possible worlds (as well as in the actual
world) makes certain fake causation claims appropriate and others not.
Apart from this more general comment, I think that three considerations
are of importance in evaluating fake causation. The first has to do with
the earlier claim about sufficient similarity. Why is it, for instance, that
causation and fake causation are seldom distinguished from one another at
the surface level? It doesnt seem to matter much whether we have to do
with genuine causation or its fake relative. Their functioning as power-
ful means-end relations is one area where they cannot be distinguished.
Their value when we are looking for ways to avoid risks is another. That
it is impossible in most cases to detect which of the two we have is a
third illustration. Furthermore, both function equally well in providing us
with evidential material. Dowes answer seems to be that our practical
concept of causation might be disjunctive. In everyday life, causation
perhaps means genuine causation or fake causation. But, clearly, unless
causation and fake causation are closely linked at a more fundamental level
a disjunctive concept would be useless, so an account like the above one is
needed to back up this story.
This brings us to the second consideration. Although similarity at a
metaphysical level is needed, it is equally important that fake causation
is not allowed to collapse into causation. We need a certain dissimilarity
as well. One must be able to explain why fake causation is not causation.
Look at Dowes condition (3). Is it sufficiently dissimilar from what one
takes genuine causal relations to be like? According to several HUMEAN2
accounts, (3) is precisely the way genuinely causal reports are to be spelled
out. If according to these accounts the only difference between (3) and
genuine causation is that the cause does not exist in (3), one may won-
der about the ontological differences. It is too much of a causal report
 CAUSE, EFFECT, AND FAKE CAUSATION 141

to comfort me. Whether the problem resides in HUMEAN2 accounts, in

Dowes suggestion, or in both, is not my primary concern. They are not a
satisfactory blend anyhow. Thus, the third attempt can only be combined
with certain causal views. But from the fake causation perspective whether
or not a certain causal view is correct should be an independent question.

6. THE ANNIHILATION OF THE CAUSAL WORLD ?

I think the problems with the two first attempts and the considerations
concerning the similarities and dissimilarities between causation and fake
causation in the third attempt already strongly suggest a theory of causation
that treats both causation and fake causation as two kinds of causation
one with and one (partly) without causal relata. I want to end this paper
by strengthening this case even more by applying a previously employed
counter example to the fake causation view above:
Even if we do not want to commit ourselves to the view that causation
is transitive, we have to admit that it sometimes is. By previous observation
it is then clear that when looking closely enough at causal chains that link
genuine events, parts of them will probably turn out to be composed of
fake causation. But since fake causation according to the third attempt is
not causation, these causal chains break down on closer inspection. What
appeared to be causal relations between two entities are no longer instances
of causation. As a consequence, we not only have to disregard a large
proportion of our causal reports, namely those that are clearly instances
of prevention or omission, but we must also disregard all those processes
where at least one part of a causal chain consists of fake causation. There
is thus a genuine possibility that all our causal reports are true (as stating
causation or fake causation, i.e. at the surface level) but that none is truly
causal. I find this possibility utterly implausible. Yet it is a consequence
of the third attempt. Any substantial metaphysical dissimilarity between
genuine and fake causation will have a considerable price.
The most efficient way to escape this precarious situation is to abandon
the cause&effect perspective in metaphysics. Once this is done the meta-
physical problem of fake causation dissolves. Fake causation is simply
causation (without a relation between cause and effect). But this avenue
is not a possibility for theories rooted in the Humean tradition, whether
HUMEAN 1 or HUMEAN 2.
142 JOHANNES PERSSON

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper, thanks to Alex-

ander Bird, Phil Dowe, Bengt Hansson, Hugh Mellor, Rebecca Schweder,
Matti Sintonen, Ann Tobin and Petri Ylikoski. I owe a special debt to
Nils-Eric Sahlin. Earlier versions of this paper were read in Krakow
and Helsinki in 1999. This work was supported by the Bank of Sweden
Tercentenary Foundation.

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Department of Philosophy
Lund University
Sweden
E-mail: johannes.persson@fil.lu.se