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An Event Without Cause

This was an ~2-hour writing exercise for my study of the Cambridge Introduction to Metaphysics.


In this short piece, I first give an intuitive account of the notion of an event and causation via an example. Then, I show how a simple counterfactual account of causation makes no distinction between an event and an equivalent disjunction of events. Thus, supposing that a disjunction of events is equally well an event, and that events cannot be self-contradictory, I determine that there is no cause for what I call a free event—the event that anything at all happened.

In An Introduction to Metaphysics, the authors give the following intuitive example of causation. Say you were to reach for a biscuit at a dinner table, but on the way, your elbow bumped into a glass of water, and so it spilled on the table. It would seem natural to say that the bump (of your elbow) caused the spill (Carrol and Markosian, 20). Moreover, that the bump and the spill were events (Carrol and Markosian, 22). Now, when the glass toppled over, it must have pointed either more northward or more southward1, but in either case the glass spilled. So if the former occurred, then latter did, and vice versa. I will call these bi-conditional events.

One sense of their similarity can be found by assuming Lewis' account of causation in terms of counterfactuals. In its simplest form, we ought to say that "c causes e if and only if, if c weren’t to occur, then e wouldn’t occur" (Carrol and Markosian, 26). In the water-spilling case, anything that counterfactually depends on the glass spilling, also depends on it spilling northward or southward, and vice versa. For example, if the glass spilled neither northward nor southward, then it would not have spilled, and thus the table would not have been wet. So, bi-conditional events are identical for the determination of causal facts.

Given that such an account of causation gives no reason, with respect to causal facts, to exclude events formed via disjunction, we may analyze the event that "the glass spilled or it did not". We may call this a free event. An analysis of this event shows that it has no cause. For if it did have a cause, there would have to be some event e such that, if e had not occurred then the glass would have both "not spilled and spilled" So, presuming that an event cannot be self-contradictory, it follows that a free event has no cause.


1 We may let the in-between points belong to northward. That is, something points northward if it points between east and west inclusive, and southward if it points between west and east exclusive.


Works Cited

Carroll, John W., and Ned Markosian. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Cambridge University Press, 2010.