UC Riverside

Causation in the law is an extremely complex issue which has vexed philosophers and legal scholars alike. A chief reason for the vexation, I claim, is that most scholars who have tackled the issue start from premises that are philosophically misguided. The conventional viewpoint is that proving causation in a legal case involves two completely distinct elements—cause-in-fact (the question of whether a defendant’s conduct actually causally produced the plaintiff’s injury), and proximate causation (the normative question of whether a defendant should be held responsible for having in fact caused the plaintiff’s harm). In this dissertation, I argue that the conventional viewpoint is incorrect. The conventional approach draws a sharp dividing line between factual and normative questions that is unjustifiable. An accurate analysis of causation in the law will recognize norms of fact and norms of value as being intricately interconnected. I propose an analysis which interprets causation in the law in terms of causal selection—the practice of selecting a “cause” from a set of conditions that were also causally necessary for the effect. Because the selection-oriented analysis emphasizes interests and purposes, it can account for the crucial interconnectedness of facts and values in legal determinations of cause-in-fact and proximate cause both. By consolidating causation in this way, we can consolidate our analysis of legal causation—that is, make it stronger.