Sorry for biting again, on Richard's last point.

I do not accept that Mackie's view, which I endorse, leads to these

obviously incorrect results.

So, taking just the last example. It would be logically correct to say

that without BOTH the failure to brake AND the nonworkability of the

brakes the harm the plaintiff suffered would ot have occurred, so that

both of them, together, are a cause of the harm suffered. The mistake (in

my view) is to think that that means that either individually constitutes

a cause of the injury, which they do not as the injury would have happened

regardless of either one of them. (The same point holds good in relation

to all the other examples.) So, Mackie's view does not lead to the view

that the nonwrokability of the brake, alone, is a cause.

Mackie, of course, was a philosopher and so that answer, for his purposes,

suffices. For us, as lawyers, a different problem arises. Is it a problem,

legally, that we canot say as a matter of logic at the time of tral as

against either the mechanic or the driver individually that their

negligence was a cause of the harm suffered as we know that the harm would

have been suffered anyway, because of the negligence of the other person?

Not at all. The correct question is to ask whether the defendant has

wronged the plaintiff. Whether D has committed a wrong vis a vis P is

wholly unaffected by whether someone else has committed a wrong, or would

have committed a wrong if D had not. In this case, what potentially made

the mechanic's conduct a breach of a duty owed to the plaintff (failure of

the brakes) never occurred, whilst the opposite is true of the driver. Put

another way, it simply does not matter as a matter of law that the injury

would have happened anyway. If I punch you on the nose I am a wrongdoer

and it doesn't matter that someone else does too, or would have done if I

had not.

So, if two people set fire to my house both are wrongdoers, and both are

also jointly liable for any consequential loss. If a loss would not have

been suffered but for the comission of one or more wrongs, each wrongdoer

is (jointly) liable for this loss, even if the loss would have been

suffered because of the wrong of someone else. This is a rule of law, and

lawyers have virtually nothing of interest to say to philosophers about

what 'causation' means.

For me, if you think your legal analysis requires you to argue that X can

cause Y even where Y would have happened regardless of X, something must

have gone wrong with the legal analysis.

best

Rob

> Regarding the latter (on which I have written a lot), i will only say

here

> that Mackie's aggregation approach to finding but-for causation is

almost

> universally considered unacceptable.  Among other things, it would lead

to

> treating the preempted poisoning as well as the preemptive shooting as

causes of the victim's death in the shooting of poisoned person

> hypothetical, to the strange conclusion that the aggregate fire was a

cause (contributed) although neither fire individually was, and to

treating both the failure to brake and the nonworkability of the brakes as

> causes (exactly opposite to Rob's conclusion) in the braking

hypothetical.