A Public Theory of Reasons and Causes

I believe that everything human beings do and feel and believe is the effect of some cause or causes, and was “determined” and even pre-determined by events which took place outside the individual person’s mind and perhaps going back all the way to the Big Bang over thirteen billions years ago. There certainly is not much wiggle room in there for freewill. I won’t go into all my reasons for believing all of that here (but you could take a look at my “Will o' the Wisp: Why We Are Not Free”). What I want to do in this little essay is discuss the very idea of causes … and reasons. 

            Teasing out a definition or analysis from the welter of ways we use a word is always a tricky task, and one that is never finished, if only because words change their meaning over time. But even at one and the same time a word may have multiple meanings. So nothing I write here is intended to be definitive. Nevertheless I sense a particular pattern or principle at work in our understanding and use of the words “cause” and “reason” that I find interesting and perhaps important, and I consider them together because it is precisely their relation that brings it out. 

My simple suggestion (first offered in “Reasons and Causes: A Pragmatic Distinction,” a section of my book Hard Atheism) is that reasons are the causes that we would adduce in any effort to persuade someone else to approve or adopt a course of action.[1] So for example, if a Republican were trying to persuade me to vote for Trump, it would hardly do for them to tell me that they like him because he is anti-immigrant. But they would have a better shot at turning me around if they told me Trump would be far more likely than the Democratic candidate to keep us out of a war. Indeed, this Republican might not even be aware that their own motive is bigotry, so they wouldn’t even cite Trump’s views of foreigners and people of color as their own reason for favoring him, even if it were, in fact, the cause. But in either case, if I were to ask them why I should (that is, why it would be rational for me to) vote for Trump, they would be wise to tell me that the reason is that he would keep us out of a war. 

Oddly enough, however, I have something similar to say about causes. For even though I am herein trying to distinguish the sorts of causes that are reasons, the means by which I am doing so applies as well to distinguishing causes from other causes that we usually don’t call causes. Thus, suppose the Republican’s appeal to Trump’s aversion to war actually had an effect on me and caused me to vote for Trump and thereby became my reason for voting for him. Nevertheless I would hardly have voted for him[2] if there had not been countless other factors at work. For example, I had to believe what the Republican was telling me. But citing that belief as the cause would only be likely as a sort of excuse – say I was in a court of law, like some of the folks who are, as I write, arguing that they were caused to storm the U.S. Capitol by their belief in what Trump had told them, even though they now consider it to have been a lie. At the time, however, they would have said they were storming the Capitol because the election had been stolen. So what even counts as a cause is relative to whom you are trying to persuade of something, be it fellow Trumpers or criminal prosecutors and a jury. (And then whichever one is picked out as the cause may also serve as the reason. Note, by the way, that the word “because” can be ambiguous between the two.) 

Similarly, then, I or we might say that I voted for Trump because Trump is not likely to get us into a war, which is to say that this presumed fact is what caused me to vote for him, and was even my reason – something I might assert if speaking to someone I want to persuade to vote for him too, but also perhaps to excuse myself in front of my Democratic friends. If it turned out that Trump was a warmonger, however, I might instead seek to excuse my vote by citing as the cause (and the reason) my belief that he would not get us into a war. 

Yet another possibility is that I, or someone else speaking about me, could cite as the cause that I am a Quaker,[3] or that I went to a Quaker school for all of my primary and secondary education, since this may well have been a big part of why I became so anti-war. But normally this would not be as salient as the more immediate explanation of my vote, namely, my belief in Trump’s pacifism. Nor would my Quakerism serve as a reason in most instances, since most people would not be moved by my being a Quaker to vote for Trump. If I were trying to persuade a fellow Quaker, however, then I might very well assert my Quakerism as my reason for voting for Trump. 

Yet another possible cause (there is no end) and reason for my voting for Trump is my desire. For surely neither the fact nor my belief in Trump’s pacifism would account for my voting for him if I did not desire peace on Earth (or at least for my country). There are war lovers out there who would see this as a reason not to vote for Trump (depending on their beliefs). 

So, in sum: “What caused me to vote for Trump is that I hate war” or “My reason for voting for him is that I hate war” or “What caused me to vote for him is his adamant opposition to U.S. involvement in any wars” or “What caused me to vote for him is my belief that he won’t get us into a war” or “The simple explanation of my voting for him is that I’m a Quaker” or “I suppose an obvious explanation of my voting for him is that I went to a Quaker school for twelve years” and so on and so forth. And the moral of the analysis: Both reasons and causes are publicly determined categorizations, depending, as they do, on whom the categorizer is intending to influence.[4]

[1] This also relates to our speaking of reasons as serving a role in justification, whereas causes provide only an explanation.

[2] By the way, for the record, I didn’t and I wouldn’t!!

[3] I don’t know if I am, but I certainly empathize with Quaker pacifism.

[4] And why. Hence they are also pragmatic. But this, I believe, is true of every categorization whatever, since the universe as we know and experience it is contingent on our desires. What I have called the publicity of our categorizations, which has been my focus in this essay, is also widespread, given that so much of our desiring occurs in a social context and hence involves persuasion.

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