Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Quasi-causation

You pray for me to get a benefit and God grants your prayer. The benefit is in an important sense a result of your prayer. But you didn’t cause the benefit, for if you had, it would have been an instance of causation with God as an intermediate cause, and it seems to violate divine aseity for God ever to be an intermediate cause.

Still, relations involving to the benefit is relevantly like a causal one. For instance, means-end reasoning applies just as it does to non-deterministic causal chains:

  • You want me to improve morally. I will improve morally if God gives me grace. So you pray that God gives me grace.

And I owe you gratitude, though I owe more to God.

There are even cases of blameworthiness where the action “goes through God”. For instance, it is a standard view (and dogma for Catholics) that God creates each soul directly. But a couple can be blameworthy for having a child in circumstances where the child can be reasonably expected to grow up morally corrupted (e.g., suppose that a white supremacists are sure to steal one’s children if one has any). Or consider sacramental actions: a couple can be blameworthy for marrying unwisely, a priest for consecrating the Eucharist in a sacrilegious context, etc.

I call these sorts of relations “quasi-causal”. It would be good to have an account of quasi-causation.

Perhaps Lewis-style counterfactual accounts of causation, while not being good accounts of causation nonetheless provide a good start at accounts of quasi-causation?

Are there any cases of quasi-causation that do not involve God? I am not sure. Perhaps constitutive explanations provide cases. Suppose your argument caused the other members of the committee to vote for the motion. Their voting for the motion partially constituted the passing of the motion. But perhaps it is not correct to say that you caused, even partially, the passing of the motion. For what you caused is the vote, and the vote isn’t the passing, but merely partially constitutive of it. But maybe we can say you quasi-caused the passing of the motion.

This post is really an invitation for people to work on this interesting notion. It also comes up briefly towards the end of my new infinity book (which is coming out in about two weeks).

7 comments:

Brandon said...

Quasi-causation sounds a lot like occasional causation -- in Malebranche, for instance, occasional causation 'goes through God', but it is proposed in order to insist that God is always the principal agent. Malebranche even has something like an account of why we can be responsible in such cases -- God only works by general laws, so the effect does depend on our providing the occasion, even though only God is actually causing anything.


Incidentally, Pascal's account of prayer seems to be that the one who prays is a proper (although not total) cause, but that God is the principal cause and the one who prays is an intermediate cause of the effects that come about through the prayer being answered.

James Goetz said...

Apart from traditional theology, I see no reason why God, the uncaused Creator, cannot also be an intermediate cause in tensed creation.

Walter Van den Acker said...

I don't see how there can be intermediate causes on classical theism, which states that nothing would be or stay in existence fro even en instant without God actively creating and sustaining it.
"Intermediate causes" seem like a rather weak cop out in order to avoid the inevitable consequences of this claim, which is that, if true, everything would be super-determined, perhaps even more so than on calvinism.

Alexander R Pruss said...

God could create and sustain an effect under the description "whatever Walter chooses to produce". Then he creates and sustains it, but it's up to you what it is.

Walter Van den Acker said...

Alex

No, because "Walter's choice" is the result of a process and each step, no matter how tiny, in this pprocess is likewise actively created and sustained by God. So the first thought in my mind is actively created and sustained in my mind as well as all other steps.
The bottom line is, anyone who consistently believes that God active creates every aspect of (non-divine) reality should be a hard-core Calvinist. Now I am glad to acknowledge that inconsistent thinking makes the world a much less boring place.

Alexander R Pruss said...

But each step might be created and sustained under a similar description that need not determine the outcome.

Walter Van den Acker said...

Alex

No, it actually can't because these steps cannot exist unless they are actively created and sustained by God and neither can the interaction between those steps.