Reasons and Causes
Sep 11th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 6 Comments |
Today being 9/11 and all, I thought I’d make the following point(s):
- The reason someone does something isn’t the cause of her/his doing it.
- In fact, if a person was caused to do something, that person didn’t do it. (Whatever/whoever cause them to do it did it.)
- People qua persons have reasons, not causes, for their actions.
- To say a person’s actions are caused by something else is to say that person isn’t a person.
I recommend for your consideration Book III of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
Reasons are scary, because you stand alone. Causes are larger than us, and allow us to never have to worry about anything more than how well we’re fitting into the herd.
Sometimes I think you, like most philosophers, are too obsessed with the minutiae of language. (I’ve always thought the obsession with language was the principal mistake of 20th century philosophy just as idealism had vitiated much of 19th century philosophy.)
However, sometimes it is very useful (which is why philosophers started doing it). In this post, you are making an absolutely crucial distinction. The oft-heard claim that poverty causes terrorism/crime/drug use/alcoholism/whatever is a slander on poor people, most of whom are not terrorists/criminals/drug users/alcoholics/whatever.
Andrew,
At the same time, the real problem is when people don’t make distinctions and then they start basing erroneous reasons off of poorly reasoned distinctions. Making distinctions in language and meaning is essential (as you made clear later) to truly coming to a well rounded understanding of life.
Jason, certainly you’re correct. As I said, I think this is a great post. It’s just that sometimes analytic philosophers (or philosophers trained in the analytic tradition) can occasionally “miss the forest for the trees” and begin engaging in irrelevant logic-chopping.
For example, many, many times, Mr. Tillman, with his “WEeding Awards” is calling attention to a sneaky rhetorical trick (an adoption of false humility, when in fact one is being sanctimonious by criticizing “us” for “our” failures) and I think that’s a valuable contribution. But then sometimes he’s criticizing sentences like “Will we enact the single largest tax increase since the Second World War as my opponent proposes, or will we keep taxes low for families and employers? This election offers Americans a very distinct choice about what kind of change we will have.” There is nothing objectionable about these sentences. No confusion is occurring, no equivocations are being made, there’s not even much in the way of misleading rhetorical devices. Of course, Mr. Tillman is correct that these sentences would be phrased differently in an ideal language or if one were obsessed with absolute precision in one’s speech. But if all we cared about was precision in language, we would communicate purely with mathematics and symbolic logic and take twelve hours to have an ordinary conversation that takes a few minutes in English.
I don’t mean to be too critical here. I wouldn’t read Mr. Tillman’s site if I didn’t think he often had a great deal of value to say and, even in those cases which I am criticizing here, he’s not saying anything particularly wrong. It’s really just my usual – clumsily coming across as critical when I mean to be laudatory.
I’ve been thinking about this all day. (Thanks for something to ponder…) Here are my observations:
Something dangerous, or atleast fallacious, sometimes happens when we philosophers start defining terms.
It seems to me the issue is that sometimes we are descriptive when we unpack definitions of words and sometimes we are perscriptive, in terms of explaining how the word should be/is used in general. Other times we are seeking to limit it’s wider meaning for the limited context of our argument.
I don’t think that we’re always obvious or explicit about which of these activities we’re doing.
To be a little more specific to the argument being made here:
It’s seems like there are all sorts of ways we often use the term cause.
I might say “Krispy Kreme donuts caused my heart attack.” When in fact they were simply one of the major causes.
I could say “Peanuts cause allergic reactions” even though other things also cause allergic reactions.
It’s totally correct to observe that treating the poor as if they are mindless slaves to their circumstances is elitist and condescending.
But it’s also niave to think that certain circumstances aren’t perfect incubators for terrorism. This doesn’t mean all the people in these environments will become terrorists. It doesn’t mean that the people lack free will… but I have to say, though, if I watched my kids starve to death I would be quite likely to want to blow something up in response to this.
Didn’t Aristotle deliniate a bunch of types of different causes at some point? Is that relevant here? (I realize how vague that reference is, but this is a frighteningly literate group, so maybe it’s enough for somebody to work with.)
None of the 9/11 hijackers watched their children starve to death or anything like that. Most of them were university-educated Saudis. However, your argument does work better for some Palestinian suicide bombers. Those who, you know, aren’t children themselves, unwillingly being turned into human bombs.
And the four causes are material, formal, efficient, and final. However, Mr. Tillman will have to field this one as I’m sure he’s more versed on this particular issue of Aristotelian metaphysics than I am.