Causation
Abstract
Many philosophers hold (what might be called) the causal hierarchy picture of the world. The picture is hierarchical because it views social entities (institutions, groups, or corporations) as being composed of psychological entities (persons or individuals), which are themselves composed of biological entities (cells), which are themselves composed of fundamental physical entities (atoms and subatomic particles). The picture is causal because it assumes that causal statements are potentially true at every level in the hierarchy. While attractive, the picture raises an important question about how any upper level causal statements can be true. On the one hand, it seems part of the picture that upper level causal statements are true only if corresponding lower level statements are, but on the other, if the corresponding lower level statements are true, there seems no reason for supposing that the upper level statements are true in the first place. This article discusses the formulation of the problem in contemporary philosophy and its relation to a different but superficially similar problem that was historically raised against Cartesian dualism. The article also suggests that the problem emerges in the causal hierarchy picture only from a mistaken interpretation of a common causal principle, usually called the exclusion principle.