• Umeå University
    Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
    Post-doctoral Fellow
Umeå, Vasterbottens Lan, Sweden
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics
General Philosophy of Science
  •  447
    Hasteners and delayers: why rains don’t cause fires
    Philosophical Studies (7): 1-20. 2018.
    We typically judge that hasteners are causes of what they hasten, while delayers are not causes of what they delay. These judgements, I suggest, are sensitive to an underlying metaphysical distinction. To see this, we need to pay attention to a relation that I call positive security-dependence, where an event E security-depends positively on an earlier event C just in case E could more easily have failed to occur if C had not occurred. I suggest that we judge that an event C is a cause of a late…Read more
  •  279
    Relativizing proportionality to a domain of events
    Synthese 200 (2): 1-20. 2022.
    A cause is proportional to its effect when, roughly speaking, it is at the right level of detail. There is a lively debate about whether proportionality is a necessary condition for causation. One of the main arguments against a proportionality constraint on causation is that many ordinary and seemingly perfectly acceptable causal claims cite causes that are not proportional to their effects. In this paper, I suggest that proponents of a proportionality constraint can respond to this objection b…Read more
  •  250
    Reasons for action: making a difference to the security of outcomes
    Philosophical Studies 180 (1): 333-362. 2022.
    In this paper, we present a new account of teleological reasons, i.e. reasons to perform a particular action because of the outcomes it promotes. Our account gives the desired verdict in a number of difficult cases, including cases of overdetermination and non-threshold cases like Parfit’s famous _Drops of water._ The key to our account is to look more closely at the metaphysics of causation. According to Touborg (_The dual nature of causation_, 2018), it is a necessary condition for causation t…Read more
  •  92
    In this dissertation, I propose a reductive account of causation. This account may be stated as follows: Causation:c is a cause of e within a possibility horizon H iff a) c is process-connected to e, and b) e security-depends on c within H. More precisely, my suggestion is that there are two kinds of causal relata: instantaneous events (defined in Chapter 4) and possibility horizons (defined in Chapter 5). Causation is a ternary relation between two actual instantaneous events – the cause c and…Read more
  •  26
    You Just Didn't Care Enough
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 24 (1). 2023.
    We refine the intuitively appealing idea that you are blameworthy for something if it happened because you did not care enough. More formally: you are blameworthy for X (where X may be an action, omission, or outcome) just in case there is the right causal-explanatory relation between your poor quality of will and X. First, we argue that blameworthiness for actions, omissions, and outcomes is concerned with negative differences: you are blameworthy for the fact that X occurred instead of X*, whe…Read more