Causation and Responsibility in the Law – On the Metaphysics of Legal Practice

Causation matters for the law. Still, despite significant progress, the concept of causation remains inadequately understood.

This interdisciplinary project aims to utilize state-of-the-art accounts of causation in metaphysics to make progress on longstanding causal issues in jurisprudence.

The project will focus on causation in Swedish tort law and discrimination law, with an initial suggestion to build on Touborg´s (2018) account of causation and the related account of moral responsibility proposed by Gunnemyr and Touborg (2023).

Other accounts will be studied for their relevance.The first year will be spent at the Department of Philosophy at Lund University and focus on causation in Swedish tort law and discrimination law in collaboration with scholars at the Faculty of Law at the same university.

The second and third years will be spent at the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University during which the project will use the results from the first year to find and develop an analysis of causation that can give reliable guidance to causation in the law; to jurisprudence in general and to Swedish tort law and discrimination law.Currently, many jurisdictions use the inaccurate But-For or NESS condition for causation, or decide causal matters on a case-to-case basis.

The project promises to enhance our understanding of causation in the law and about causation in general, and therefore to give an account of causation that provides more reliable guidance in causal matters.