Thomas Byrne

In ‘Legal Causation,’ I proposed a new account of legal causation. Here, I extend and supplement that account to cover the actus reus of both principal- and accessory liability. The upshot is a new account of criminal liability for result crimes. It holds that the defendant is liable for, e.g., the victim’s death if and only if the defendant culpably either killed the victim or increased the risk that the victim would die. My pitch is that the account well-captures the central, settled tenets of criminal liability and that it does so in a metaphysically simple and principled way.

There is a metaphysical difference between person A killing person B and A merely letting B die. There is also a metaphysical difference between A saving B and A merely letting B live. This paper argues that the metaphysical difference between saving and letting live gives rise to a moral difference. It then puts that moral difference to work: for example, it accounts for the long-felt moral difference between failing to rescue a drowning child and failing to donate $4000 to Oxfam (sufficient for them, in the aggregate, to prevent a child's death).

We can cause windows to break and we can break windows; we can cause villages to flood and we can flood villages; and we can cause chocolate to melt and we can melt chocolate. Each time these can come apart: if, for example, A merely instructs B to break the window, then A causes the window to break without breaking it herself. Each instance of A breaking/flooding/melting/burning/killing/etc. something, is an instance of what I call making. I argue that making is an independent, theoretically important notion—akin but irreducible to causing—and metaphysicians should pay attention to it.