Abstract

Hart and Honoré contend, in their book Causation in the Law, that causal appraisals in everyday life and in the law can be made, with justifiable confidence, without appealing to relevant general laws; that in order to grasp the workings of causal notions in everyday life and the law, it is sufficient to note that causes are events which interfere with or intervene in the course of events which would normally have taken place. This thesis is criticized on the ground that what purport to be purely causal appraisals are hopelessly vulnerable to moral considerations, especially when such appraisals are presumed to take place in complete independence of scientific theory