Causation Theory and the Causes of Sexual Violence

Abstract

As the very title of John Mackie's The Cement of the Universe reminds us, causation permeates and holds together our lives, our language, and our laws. Causal claims are part of our everyday discourse, causal assumptions undergird many of our actions, and causal relationships lie at the heart of that large body of laws presupposing such a relationship between the immediate regulatory target and some more foundational governmental concern. Not unexpectedly, the omnipresence of causal relationships and the pervasiveness of our concern with them have generated multiple conceptions of what it is for something to be the cause of something else. Insofar as these various conceptions are cabined within the domains in which they have been developed, and for which they are most useful, little harm comes from mutually coexisting but different conceptions of causation. Yet the inevitable and desirable leakage among disciplines, and among professional, political, and public domains, has as an unfortunate byproduct an increased risk of conceptual confusion as strikingly different conceptions of causation are misleadingly referred to under the same rubric in the same domain.

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