Causation and Responsibility: An Essay in Law, Morals, and Metaphysics - Softcover

Moore, Michael S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199599513 ISBN 13: 9780199599516

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010

Synopsis

The concept of causation is fundamental to ascribing moral and legal responsibility for events. Yet the relationship between causation and responsibility remains unclear. What precisely is the connection between the concept of causation used in attributing responsibility and the accounts of causal relations offered in the philosophy of science and metaphysics? How much of what we call causal responsibility is in truth defined by non-causal factors? Causation and Responsibility argues that much of the legal doctrine on these questions is confused and incoherent, and offers the first comprehensive attempt since Hart and Honore to clarify the philosophical background to the legal and moral debates.
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The book first sets out the place of causation in criminal and tort law and outlines the metaphysics presupposed by the legal doctrine. It then analyzes the best theoretical accounts of causation in the philosophy of science and metaphysics, and using these accounts criticizes many of the core legal concepts surrounding causation - such as intervening causation, foreseeability of harm, and complicity. It considers and rejects the radical proposals to eliminate the notion of causation from law by using risk analysis to attribute responsibility. The result of the analysis is a powerful argument for revising our understanding of the role played by causation in the attribution of legal and moral responsibility.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Moore holds the Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Chair at the University of Illinois, where he is jointly appointed as the Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy. His major works include Placing Blame (OUP, 1997), Act and Crime, (OUP, 1993) and Law and Psychiatry (CUP, 1984).

Review

"The most comprehensive study of this topic since Hart and Honore, this work pulsates with arguments and examples, all in the service of an integrated picture of the interactions between law, morals, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysics of causation. Moore's uncompromising realism
brings a remarkable unity to his argument, and will form the starting point for any similar discussion from now onwards."

--Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge

"My very highest recommendation-this book deserves a place on the shelf of every legal academic."

--Lawrence Solum

"This must rank as one of the most successful applications of analytical philosophy to substantive questions of law ever. There are few important questions of criminal, tort, contract, and property law that are not in some significant way intertwined with issues of causation. As a result,
there are few such questions that this book leaves untouched, or unchanged. The book should fire the imagination of all willing to look in a fresh way at some of the most fundamental problems of law. No one trying to think seriously about those problems will be able to proceed, nor indeed would want
to proceed, without reckoning with its insights and arguments."

--Leo Katz, Frank Carano Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0199599513
• ISBN 13: 9780199599516
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 634