What Is Real · ages 9–12
Did you cause that, or did it just happen?
The window broke after you kicked the ball. You didn't mean to. Did you cause it?
Kick a ball, break a window. Ask what caused the break and you will get four different true answers, and the confusion between them is where most arguments about blame live.
There is what the window is made of, which is why it broke rather than dented. There is the shape and speed of the glass and the ball. There is you, standing on the grass, swinging a leg. And there is the fact that the window was there to be hit. Aristotle listed all four and pointed out that people who disagree about cause are often just answering different questions.
Then Hume asked a harder thing. Watch the ball approach the glass, watch it break. Where in what you saw was the making-happen? You saw one event, then another, a great many times. You never saw necessity. He concluded that the feeling of must is something we add, a habit of expectation built from repetition. Kant said in reply that without that habit we could not experience anything as happening at all.
That leaves you with a practical question that is worth answering honestly, because courts and parents have to. Suppose you did not mean to, but you could easily have known better. Did you cause it? Almost everybody says yes. Which means the word cause, in ordinary use, is doing two jobs at once: explaining what happened, and assigning who is answerable for it.
Try it
Take something that happened today. Write the chain of things that had to happen for it to occur, going back at least five steps. Find the point where your part stops mattering.
What do you think?
Do you think there is a right answer to this question?
Talk about it
- Does 'cause' mean you meant it, or just that you were part of the chain?
- If nothing had been different, would it have happened?
- Can something be a cause without being to blame?
Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make
If I didn't mean it, I didn't cause it.
Then a careless driver who forgot to check a mirror caused nothing, which no court and no parent has ever accepted. Meaning matters for blame; it is not the same as causing.
Everything that happens was caused by something, all the way back.
Possibly — but then your kicking the ball was also caused, all the way back, and the word 'you' is being asked to do a lot of work in a chain that long.
Causes are obvious. The stone broke the window.
The stone was thrown, the window was brittle, the child was tired, nobody had mended the pane. Which of those gets called the cause depends on what you are trying to explain.
What other philosophers think
- AristotleListed four different things people mean by cause: what it is made of, its shape, what set it moving, and what it was for. Most arguments about causes are people using different ones.
- David HumeLooked for the cause and never found it. All we actually observe is one thing, then another, again and again — the 'must' is added by us, not seen.
- Immanuel KantReplied that we could not have a coherent experience at all without reading the world in terms of cause and effect. It is a condition of noticing anything.
If you want to go further
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume1748. The argument that we never actually observe one thing making another happen.
- Physics — AristotleBook II, where the four senses of 'cause' are separated.
Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.