Date: Mon, 01 Jun 1998 09:04:57 +0800
From: Alan Norrie <alan.w.norrie-AT-kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Causal powers of absences? and other things


Dear Caroline,

Welcome to the reading group.  Thanks very much for bringing us back to the
substance of absence in ch.2.1 of DPF, and for resuming the discussion that
Howard initiated. 

(I must admit, I had rather lost the thread of the DPF discussion.  As a
general point, should we be signalling more clearly when we are discussing
a critical realist issue linked to the reading of DPF, as opposed to
raising a general CR issue?)

I have two points.  One is a response to your final point, the other is a
question that I think relates to the discussion but I would like some help
with it.

1.	I would like to respond to your final point by saying something about
how the absence of action (omission) is understood in legal theory and the
associated moral philosophy.  In law and in moral philosophy, there is a
debate about whether a failure to act is as culpable as an act.  For
example there is the distinction between killing (an act) and letting die
(an omission).  While this distinction is regularly made in medico-legal
situations in order to distinguish what doctors may or may not do to, for
example, brain dead patients, it is also acknowledged that the distinction
is often highly problematic both in terms of just making it analytically
(an omission can often be represented as an act and vice versa) and in
terms of regarding it as a means of making a significant moral
differentiation.

One main reason for the moral differentiation problem is that an omission
can be analysed as having many of the properties of an act, and can indeed
be argued to be a kind of 'negative act'.  The way in which this is argued
is to say that an omission to act can cause a result just as can a
'positive' act.  Thus my failure to apply my handbrake when parking my car
on a hill is an omission, but it can be said to cause the car to roll down
the hill with whatever consequences follow.  Such a failure to act is not
significantly different from an actual releasing of the handbrake which has
the same result.

How is this argued?  One way is to talk about what is a 'normal act
expectation' in a given situation, in the absence of which, the failure to
act will be regarded as culpable.  Thus it is an expectation that a driver
will normally put on the handbrake on a hill, and the failure to do so
leads to the conclusion that she caused the accident that resulted.
Similarly, the failure or omission of a council worker to water the flowers
when it is part of the job to do so leads to the conclusion that the
worker's omission caused them to wilt.

I would suggest that one could move from the concept of omission to the
concept of absence fairly readily: an omission is an absence of action.  If
this is so, then I also don't see a problem in moving from social to
natural settings either and talking about the failure (absence) of the
monsoon or the hole in the ozone layer causing the failed plans or skin
cancer.  It is the 'normal expectation' of the coming of the monsoon, where
monsoons are highly regular occurrences, or the previous existence of the
ozone layer that allows us to say that their absence is a cause.

To take another example.  If we lived in a land where a disease regularly
killed children, we would say that the action of the disease was causative.
 Suppose a vaccine was discovered and administered so that the disease was
eradicated.  Later, through cuts in public investment (this is just a
hypothetical, of course it could never happen in any actual world we know)
the vaccine becomes unavailable to a portion of children and they begin to
die from the disease again.  What has caused those children's deaths?  Of
course, we would say that at one level it is the disease, but we would not
be wrong to also say that the absence of vaccine caused the deaths because
by the time of the cuts in health care, it has become a normal social
expectation that the vaccine will be available as a matter of course.  Its
absence then becomes a cause of death.

2.	Can I ask a question about a passage I referred to in my previous mail,
which I think may be relevant to some of the other points Caroline, and now
Colin, raise.  At the top of p.47, RB says that 'Within the world as we
know it, non-being is at least on a par with being.  Outwith it the
negative has ontological primacy.'

This seems to me to have something to do with the issues at stake, but if
we just take this distinction as it stands: between the world as we know it
- and what?  Is there another world? Surely there is only the world as we
know it?

Answers on a postcard please .....

Alan Norrie




I don’t believe that absences can be causally
>powerful.  It’s only in a grammatical sense that the hole in the ozone
>layer , rather than what it lets through,  has causal power.  My plans
>for the monsoon were caused (among other things) by false beliefs, which
>were good reasons (perhaps) for acting in certain ways.  The monsoon I
>expected never came.  The monsoon’s absence is not like that of  Pierre,
>who exists elsewhere, but more like that of a fictional character.  It
>isn’t the absent monsoon that has causal powers, but  the (positive)
>weather that actually came... The disjunction between my expectations
>(of monsoon) and the real weather have causal powers, if you like. It’s
>true that RB does refer to the ‘impact’ and the ‘effect’ of some of
>these absences.  I would have thought merely that attending to absences
>(like symptomatic silences) draws our attention to what’s going on, by
>distinguishing it from what might have, but has not, happened...
>But I am left uneasily feeling that the various meanings of ‘absence’
>and ‘negation’ have been rhetorically but not substantively (!) linked.
>




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