干预主义下的因果选择及一种多世界干预标准

The Causal Selection Under Interventionism and a Criterion for Multi-world Intervention

在有氧气的情况下划亮一根火柴,直觉上会选择划火柴而不是有氧气作为的火柴燃烧的原因。但原始的干预主义的结构方程架构蕴涵两者都是原因,放弃了因果选择,因而是有缺陷的。一些哲学家认为可以在原结构方程架构中加入干预的合适标靶标准,进行因果选择。本文提出了一个新反例,它表明合适标靶标准是错误的。在此基础上,本文给出了一个不必假设所谓的合适标靶的因果选择标准,即多世界干预。该标准不涉及道德上善恶及责任归属问题,也不需主观地设想每个可能世界的正常性的排序,因而是一种客观的、自然主义的因果选择标准。

When you light a match with the presence of oxygen,you would likely select the lighting of the match instead of the presence of oxygen as the cause of fire.However,the original interventionist structural equation framework views both as causes and it abandons the causal selection,and therefore it is defective.Some philosophers believe that a criterion for a suitable target of intervention can be added into the structural equation framework to achieve causal selection.This paper presents a new counterexample,which shows that the criterion for causal selection with suitable targets is wrong.On such basis,this paper puts forward a criterion for causal selection which does not need to suppose the presence of the so-called suitable target of intervention,namely the criterion of multi-world intervention for causal selection.As this criterion neither appeals to moral correctness or attribution of responsibilities nor imagines any normality ranking of possible worlds subjectively,it is an objective and naturalistic theory of causal selection.