Brian Hanley
In cases where many causes together bring about an effect, it is common to select some causes as particularly important. Philosophers since Mill have been pessimistic about analyzing this reasoning due its variability and the multifarious pragmatic details of how these selections are made. I argue Mill was right to think these details matter, but wrong that they preclude philosophical understanding of causal selection. In fact, as I illustrate, analyzing the pragmatic details of preventing accidents can illuminate how scientists reason about the important causes of disasters in complex systems, and can shed new light on how causal selection works.
I examine the case of the Bhopal disaster. Investigators found that human error and component failures caused the disaster. However, in addition to these proximate causes, many systemic factors also caused the disaster. Many safety scientists have argued that poor operating conditions, bad safety culture, and design deficiencies are the more important causes of disasters like Bhopal.
I analyze this methodological disagreement about the important causes of disasters in terms of causal selection. By appealing to pragmatic details of the purposes and reasoning involved in selecting important causes, and relating these details to differences among causes in a Woodwardian framework, I demonstrate how analysis of causal selection can go beyond where most philosophers stop, and how engineering sciences can offer a new perspective on the problem of causal selection.
