Chapter 13
Cause
Introduction
Determinism
Science
Nature of Causation
Did you really believe when they told you the cause?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
390
Introduction
It wasn't me that made him fall, no you can't blame me at all.
391
Introduction
Law, as we have said, changes the world. It does so by acting on people and
causing them to change their behaviour. When people change their behaviour,
it causes further change. First, it changes the behaviour of other people (and
there may well be a chain reaction in this regard). Second, people also change
the inanimate part of the world by the things that they do and do not do in
response to the law.
This is why causation is of central importance. Law causes change. For this
reason causation is one of the fundaments of purposive action (the other being
evaluation). As the Government of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in
its platform: “What matters is what works”.
392
Causation invokes the twin
concepts of cause and effect, which are also referred to as means and ends -
the effect is the end for which action is undertaken and the action is the means
for achieving or causing an end.
___________________
390
Eric Bogle No Man’s Land The poem in the song is a conversation which the
performer has with a soldier killed in action while sitting at his grave side in a
World War I military cemetery of mass graves.
391
Bob Dylan (1963) Who Killed Davey Moore
392
Blair, T. and Cunningham, J. 1999, Modernising Government, Prime Minister
and Minister for the Cabinet Office, London, United Kingdom
 |
 |
 |