Dear all,
After seeing several investigations both in house and from public access (most notably the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, CSB) I found a pattern of causation. Most of the time they are defined as counterfactuals.
Normally one would expect the form:
Because A happened, B happened. That is a direct causation in the Hume definition of cause.
But it is very common to see:
"Because A did not happen, B happened" or the "Had A happened, B would not have occurred"
While it is generally accepted that omissions are causes there is no clear cut between an omission or something that just did not happen. In a mundane example, if I travel and ask my daughter to water my plants, she said yes, and when I come back the plants are bone dry then, is is correct to say that her "not watering the plants" is the cause of the plants dying. However, my neighbour did not water the plants either. She saw my plants not being watered and did nothing. But her not taking action it is not a cause. Neither the mail man that also saw the plants dying.
One example where I see this pattern, is the Chevron Richmond refinery fire (http://www.csb.gov/a..._2015-01-28.pdf), where one of the causes listed is " Despite the known risks of unmonitored sulfidation corrosion rates in potentially low-silicon carbon steel piping components, the CSB found that API RP 939-C specifically refrained from requiring companies to search for low-silicon piping components in their facilities"
Apart from the strange use of "found", as if it was hidden before, it seems that this case is more like the case of my neighbor than the case of my daughter and the CSB is over reaching, taking a self righteous stand, playing politics, playing a blame game or just using flawed logic (or any combination of the preceding).
My request to the forum is the following:
¿Have you come across any work that is written to a layman about this topics of causation by omission or counterfactuals? ¿Can you recommend any reading on this issue?
I've searched for philosophical work starting from Hume to the counterfactual theories of Lewis, but generally they are full of a academic jargon that is difficult to translate to action in concrete situations like an incident investigation.
Edited by Art Montemayor, 10 February 2017 - 02:31 PM.
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