Brian Ortmann
Department of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg
Downward causation is causation between higher-level causes (e.g. mental ones) and lower-level effects (e.g. physical ones). Intuitively, there are many instances of downward causation. For example, if I form the desire to move, and subsequently move, my desire is a higher-level cause of my move at the physical level. However, Kim (2005) argues that downward causation to the physical level is inconsistent with plausible assumptions about causation and the relation between higher-level events and their physical bases. Promising approaches of causation (e.g. Woodward (2005)’s Interventionism and Sprites et al. (2001)’s Causal Bayes Nets) entail either that higher-level events are causally excluded by their physical realizers (c.f. Baumgartner 2010; Gebharter 2017) or that the putative effects of higher-level events are systematically overdetermined by higher-level events and their physical realizers. In response, these approaches have been modified such that they allow for downward causation. However, these modifications implausibly entail that whenever the physical basis of a higher-level event is a cause of an effect, so does the higher-level event. For example, according to these theories, given that Socrates’s death is a part of the physical basis of the higher-level event of Xantippe becoming a widow and that Socrates’s death is a cause of the decomposition of Socrates’s body, Xantippe’s becoming a widow is a cause of the decomposition of Socrates’s body (c.f. Lee 2021).
I employ Skow (2016)’s distinction between first-level reasons, i.e., causes and grounds, and second-level reasons, i.e., reasons why certain causes and grounds are reasons, and argue that higher-level events seem to be causes only if they are second-level reasons that explain why their physical realisers are causes. While some second-level reasons are this in virtue of being among the joint causes of these effects, other second-level reasons such as laws of nature are not causes. If higher-level events are second-level reasons, then either the only targets of the influence of mental events are not their alleged effects but the causal connections between these effects and their physical causes, or higher-level events are among the joint causes of their putative physical effects. I argue for the latter by showing that, being joint causes, higher-level events and their physical realizers do not overdetermine their effects.
Bibliography
Baumgartner, M. (2010). Interventionism and epiphenomenalism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 40(3), 359-383.
Gebharter, A. (2017). Causal exclusion and causal Bayes nets. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 95(2), 353-375.
Kim, J. (2007). Physicalism, or something near enough.
Lee, S. (2022). Collective Actions, Individual Reasons, and the Metaphysics of Consequence. Ethics, 133(1), 72-105.
Skow, B. (2016). Reasons why. Oxford University Press.
Sprites, P., Glymour, C., & Scheines, R. (2001). Causation, Prediction, and Search. 2nd edtion.
Woodward, J. (2005). Making things happen: A theory of causal explanation. Oxford university press.
Chair: Andres Rodriguez Rojas
Time: 03 September, 14:40 – 15:10
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 