Analysis Advance Access originally published online on July 8, 2009
Analysis 2009 69(4):605-611; doi:10.1093/analys/anp099
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Bilking the bilking argument
Future of Humanity Institute University of Oxford 16-17 St Ebbe's Street, Oxford OX1 1PT, UK rebecca.roache@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
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Is it conceptually possible for an event, L, to be the cause of an earlier event, E? Some writers have employed the so-called bilking argument to attempt to show that the idea of such backwards causation is incoherent (Flew 1956, 1957, 1964, Black 1956). According to this argument, if we are presented with what someone claims to be a case of backwards causation, it would be possible in principle to wait for E to occur, and then intervene to prevent the occurrence of L, thus demonstrating that E could not have been caused by L after all. Moreover, if our attempts to bilk L-type events (for short, L-events) having observed E-type events (E-events) always fail, we have grounds to argue that any causal relationship between the two is not one of backwards causation, but of ordinary, forwards, earlier-to-later
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