The other additional point needed is the purpose or value served by legal doctrines that use a concept of causality. Legal concepts are functional (sometimes stylized, “interpretive”) concepts because their meaning is shaped by the values they serve in the doctrines in which they appear, just as it is shaped by the linguistic facts (definition and usage) mentioned above (Fuller 1958). To the definitions just mentioned, we should add the facts of use about how “causality” is used to solve the problems that arise in some cases. This makes it possible to compare the explicit legal definitions of causality discussed above with the notion of causality implicit in the decided cases. It also allows philosophers to compare their preferred solutions to various causal puzzles with the solving of the same puzzles of people who have no philosophical axes to grind, but whose considerations have real consequences, i.e. judges. (When J.L. Austin (1957) said that philosophers could learn as much from lawyers on questions of causality as they could from lawyers from philosophers.) With considerable selectivity, some simplification and little claim to completeness, fifteen facts are selected below as exceptional in the legal use of the concept of causality. In this context, the fundamental questions of causation in law are: (i) what are the legal criteria for determining whether an act or event caused another (usually harmful) event; (ii) whether and to what extent causality in legal contexts differs from causality outside the law, for example: in science and in everyday life; and (iii) what reasons (presumably based on the use of causality by law to assign responsibility) explain and/or justify the differences that can be established. 10.
However, there is no liability for damage caused in part by a defendant if that damage was also caused in part by a natural event of insane magnitude that fell between the defendant`s act and the damage partially caused by him (the vis-major part of the common law doctrine; Larremore, 1909). 2. If the defendant`s act does not increase the likelihood of damage occurring and, in particular, if that act reduces that probability, the defendant is not liable for that damage because he is alleged not to have caused it, even if the occurrence of that damage depends counterfactually on the defendant`s action (Oxendine v. State). A second unified view of causality in law is the oldest of these types of propositions. He understands causality as a metaphysical primitive. Causality is not reducible to any other type of thing or thing, so there is little analysis to be said about it, and so little that juries should be informed of it (Smith 1911). The only thing we can say is that the causal relationship is a scalar relationship, that is, a matter of degree. One thing may be more a cause of a particular event than another. Given the scality of causality, the law need only draw the line of demarcation of responsibility somewhere on the scale that marks the degree of causal contribution.
For questions that vary on a smooth continuum, it is notoriously arbitrary to choose an exact breakpoint; Where is the line between middle age and age, red and pink, bald and not bald or caused and not caused? This approach therefore adopts a reasonably vague line, below which the causal contribution to a given injury is ignored for the purposes of assessing liability. The defendant should only be liable for damage if the degree of its causal contribution to that harm has reached a magnitude that is not de minimis or “substantial”. This is the original test of the “essential factor” as articulated by Jeremiah Smith in 1911. To the general objection that the test tells us little, its defenders reply that it is a virtue and not a vice, because there is little to say about causality. Like hardcore pornography, causality is something we “can know when we see it” (Potter Stewart`s language on pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio) without the need for general definitions and tests (Borgo 1979). However, an alternative view of legal ends reduces law to the metaphysics of causality. According to this view, criminal law serves the value of retaliatory justice, just as tort law serves the value of corrective justice. Retributive justice requires that those who cause culpable harm be punished and deprived; Corrective justice requires that those who have wronged others correct that injustice by compensating that other.
In both cases, service to these types of justice requires that the “cause” as used in the rules of legal liability not be identified as anything other than that with which it is identified in these theories of justice. Since such theories of moral justice require that the true metaphysics of causality determine when one has inflicted harm or other harm on another, so must the law of misdemeanours and felonies. In such an alternative vision of the justification of causal requirements in the law of misdemeanours and crimes, the lawyer must therefore “deal with the philosopher” with the metaphysics of causality. Those who are going through such an adventure themselves will not consider all candidates for the concept of causality of the law with equal support.