The Life you do Not Save: Reflections on the Causal Element in the Notion of a Decision's Consequences

摘要

The motivation for the following considerations comes from a remark Weyma Luebbe makes in the very last paragraph of her paper, where she writes: "There are unsolved ambiguities in (many)consequentialists' implicit causal theories. […] I have no thesis to offer that would at once clean up this mess" (Luebbe, 2020, section 6). My aim here is to use some insights from the recent literature on the philosophy of causation to try to resolve the ambiguities Luebbe mentions. Via this route, I come to conclusions that are very similar to Luebbe's, consequences that, in my view, are very damaging for the consequentialist project.