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What does it mean to say that an action caused some consequence? At the very least, it presumes (does it not?) that the action preceded that consequence. But that alone (this much we know) is not enough to make the action the cause, no? What more is required then? Well, there is the standard answer (we'ver heard this one before): the sine qua non (without which not) rule. This says that an action X causes some consequence Y when the occurrence of X is necessary for the occurrence of Y, i. e., Y would not have occurred if X had not occurred:

Suppose John drives past a stop sign and crashes into Henry's car who had no chance to avert John's oncoming BMW. Here we might say that John's failure to stop at the stop sign, his passing the stop sign and driving into oncoming traffic, in this instance, into Henry in his red VW beetle, was the cause of the accident because if John had not done so, the accident would not have occurred. John's passing the stop sign was the necessary condition for the occurence of the accident.

This, of course, sounds good, even seems to work until we look at it more closely:

Suppose John and Alice were riding their motorcycles, both Harleys, and they zoom by Henry and his horse which Henry is riding along a dirt road to his neighbor's farm where the horse is stabled. John and Alice zoom by, each on either side of Henry and his horse, like so: The sound of the motorcycles and the dirt they kick up so frighten Henry's horse, that it bolts, tipping Henry out of the saddle. Henry's foot, however, catches in a stirrup and he is dragged along, bumpity-bump, into a field where he eventually becomes disentangled but not before he suffers a dislocated shoulder, badly bruised hip and broken ankle.

This accident would have occurred (let's say) even if Alice or John alone had passed by on one side or the other of Henry's horse. Here we have what is sometimes called an "over-determined" event. Both John's action and Alice's action caused the accident. But now apply the sine qua non rule. According to the rule, neither John nor Alice caused the accident. Alice's action did not cause Henry's injury because (well, because) it (Henry's accident) would have occurred anyway; it would have happened even if Alice had not driven by on her motorcycle because John's action was sufficent to cause Henry's horse to bolt. And John's action (according to the theory) did not cause Henry's bruised hip and dislocated shoulder because he would have been injured even if John hadn't zoomed by (Alice's action would have been enough to cause the damage). Neither John's action nor Alice's action is necessary for the occurrence of Henry's accident, yet both are causes. This might (one would hope) lead one to suspect that there's something amiss with the sine qua non theory.

The sine qua non theory also leads to the absurd view that any causal factor, any causal pre-condition, necessary for the occurrence of some consequence, was its cause. So back-track to John's running of the stop sign. The accident to Henry's VW Beetle would not have occurred if John had not been born. John's birth is a necessary occurrence for his running the stop sign. Indeed for any given accident, the accident would not have occurred if one of the parties to the accident had not been born. Take Henry, for instance. The accident to him would not have occurred if he had not been born; so according to the sine qua non theory Henry caused his own accident. Whatever theory we muster with regard to cause we need, it would seem, to be able to distinguish between cause and causal condition or between the cause and all the other causal factors. What makes something the cause of a particular consequence? And what distinguishes it, the cause, from all the other possible causal candidates?

How about a view that holds that an action X causes some consequence Y in those cases where X is sufficient for the occurrence of Y? This rescues us from the absurd conclusion that all accidents are caused by the births of the parties involved. Since whatever it is, John's birth is at least not sufficient for the occurrence of Henry's accident. But this alone will not do. If we want to claim, for instance, as we did above that John's zooming by Henry's horse on his motorcycle was sufficient to cause Henry's horse to bolt, we would need to make one very important qualification. We would have to say, something to the effect, John's action caused Henry's accident, "all other things being exactly as they were." The accident would not have occurred if, for instance, Henry had been a better rider, or if someone else had been standing nearby to grab the reins of Henry's horse as it motioned to bolt. So John's action is sufficient only in a given context. Only in that context is John's action sufficient to cause Henry's accident. Is this then a good theory? Should we be satisfied with it? Happy? Why pick John's action out from the context and not some other factor within the context: Henry's failure, say, to hold onto the reins? Why is a particular action picked out from all the other circumstances? On what basis, according to which criteria, in general, do we "select" X (as the cause) from a given context and treat it as significant? How about the following?

[The] 'selection' is by no means arbitrary. It is made according to a definite principle. If my car 'conks out' on a hill and I wonder what the cause is, I shall not consider my problem solved by a passer-by who tells me that the top of the hill is further away from the earth's center than its bottom, and that consequently more power is needed to take a car uphill than to take her along the level. All this is [of course] quite true; what the passer-by has described is one of the conditions which, together, form the true cause of my car's stopping; and he has "arbitrarily selected" one of these and called it "the cause." But now suppose someone from AAA comes along, opens the bonnet, holds up a loose tension lead, and says "look here, sir, you're running on three cylinders." My problem is now solved. I know the cause of the stoppage. It is the cause. It has not been "arbitrarily selected." It has been correctly identified as the thing that I can put right, after which the car will go properly. If I had been a person who could flatten hills by stamping on them, the passer-by would have been right to call my attention to the hill as the cause of the stoppage; not because the hill is a hill, but because I can flatten it out. (R. G. Collingwood, ,I>Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1938)

Hart and Honore believe this account to be incorrect and think a different and more complex account is needed, although they offer a rather bleak prognostication of our ability to answer the question at all:

"The line between cause and mere condition is in fact drawn by common sense on principles which vary in a subtle and complex way, both with the type of causal question at issue and the circumstances in which causal questions arise. Any general account of these principles is therefore always in danger of oversimplyfying them. Some have succumbed to this temptation. Collingwood treats the question "What is the cause of an event?" as if it was always equilvalent to "How can we produce or prevent the event?" Such a view would make it improper to speak of knowing, for example, the cause of cancer, if we could not use our knowledge to prevent it. Perhaps the only general observation of value is that in distinguishing between causes and conditions, two distinctions are of prime importance. These are the contrasts between what is abnormal and what is normal in relation to any given thing or subject-matter, and between a free deliberate human action and all other conditions."

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