Sara J. Bernstein

I present and develop the view that omissions are de re modal possibilities of actual events. Omissions do not literally fail to occur; rather, they possibly occur. An omission is a tripartite metaphysical entity composed of an actual event, a possible event, and a contextually specified counterpart relation between them.

I use the view to make new inroads in understanding the role of omissions in causation and in moral responsibility. In particular, I show how the view gives us a new grasp on Peter Singer's argument for giving to charity, in which failing to give to charity is likened to failing to save a drowning child. I use my view to show why Singer's argument is resistant to lines of argumentation that attempt to show differences between the child's drowning and the failing to give to charity: both omissions are on par metaphysically.

The problem of profligate omissions is as follows: Suppose that the gardener promises to water your plant while you are out of town, the gardener fails to water it, and the plant dies. Intuitively, the gardener's failing to water the plant is a cause of the plant's death. But the Queen of England also failed to water the plant, and the counterfactual "Had the Queen of England not failed to water the plant, the plant would not have died" is true. Thus a simple counterfactual test would lead us to classify the Queen of England's omission as a cause of the plant's death. How can we metaphysically distinguish the relevant omission or omissions from the irrelevant ones?

One attempt to solve the problem of profligate omissions utilizes proportionality. Proportionality selects a single determinate of a determinable-- the determinate proportional to the effect-- as the exclusive cause of an effect.

I argue that proportionality can't solve the problem of profligate omissions, for two reasons. First reason: the determinate/ determinable relationship that holds between properties like blue and aqua does not hold between negative properties like not blue and not aqua. Negative properties are those at stake in omissive causation. Second reason: proportionality misconstrues the nature of the problem that it purports to solve.

This article surveys the current state of play on the metaphysics of omissions, and suggests new avenues for investigation.

This paper gives a framework for understanding causal counterpossibles, counterfactuals imbued with causal content whose antecedents appeal to metaphysically impossible worlds. Such statements are generated by omissive causal claims that appeal to metaphysically impossible events, such as “If the mathematician had not failed to prove that 2+2=5, the math textbooks would not have remained intact.” After providing an account of impossible omissions, the paper argues for three claims: (i) impossible omissions play a causal role in the actual world, (ii) causal counterpossibles have broad applications in philosophy, and (iii) the truth of causal counterpossibles provides evidence for the nonvacuity of counterpossibles more generally.

Ontological pluralism is the view that there is more than one fundamental way of being. This paper sketches ontological pluralism about non-being, the idea that non-being can be further divided into more fundamental categories. After drawing out the relationship between pluralism about being and pluralism about non-being, I discuss quantificational strategies for the pluralist about non-being. I examine historical precedent for the view. Finally, I suggest that pluralism about non-being has explanatory power across a variety of domains, and that the the view can account for differences between nonexistent past and future times, between omissions and absences, and between different kinds of fictional objects.

This edited volume of new essays covers a range of topics related to non-being, including non-existent objects, absences, omissions, holes, negative entities, and nonsense, from a variety of philosophical perspectives and traditions.

Contributors include Arif Ahmed, Fatema Amijee, Sara Bernstein, Filippo Casati & Naoya Fujikawa, Roberto Casati & Achille Varzi, Eddy Chen, Koji Tanaka, Bryan Frances, Tyron Goldschmidt & Sam Lebens, Lorraine Juliano-Keller and John Keller, Graham Priest, Jacob Ross, Daniel Rubio, Carolina Sartorio, Aaron Segal, Roy Sorensen, and Craig Warmke.

Vagueness and indeterminacy are thought to infect many of our most important metaphysical tools—existence, composition, persistence, parthood, essence, and identity, to name a few. More recently, vagueness and indeterminacy have been thought to infect our moral properties and predicates as well: terms like “is permissible” or "is required" are thought to be vulnerable to vagueness. Here I uncover a new form of ethical vagueness. I argue that several sorts of vagueness and indeterminacy infect the causal relation. If, as it is plausible to hold, there is a relationship between causation and moral responsibility, then the vagueness and indeterminacy that infect the causal relation will also infect the metaphysics of moral responsibility in interesting ways.

This paper poses an original puzzle about the relationship between causation and moral responsibility called The Moral Difference Puzzle. Using the puzzle, the paper argues for three related ideas: (1) the existence of a new sort of moral luck; (2) an intractable conflict between the causal concepts used in moral assessment; and (3) inability of leading theories of causation to capture the sorts of causal differences that matter for moral evaluation of agents’ causal contributions to outcomes.

This paper discusses a puzzling tension in attributions of moral responsibility in cases of resultant moral luck: we seem to hold agents fully morally responsible for unlucky outcomes, but less-than fully-responsible for unlucky outcomes brought about differently than intended. This tension cannot be easily discharged or explained, but it does shed light on a famous puzzle about causation and responsibility, the Thirsty Traveler.

I suggest that certain types of causal processes, deviant causal chains, pose problems for several key legal concepts. First, they pose an in-principle problem for the legal distinction between attempts and completed crimes. Second, they present a practical problem for the joint sufficiency of actus reus (an act contributing to an outcome) and mens rea (intention to cause an outcome) for criminal liability for completed crimes. Finally I suggest that legal and philosophical attempts to deal with these problems have to date been unsuccessful.

In this commentary on Bazargan-Forward's book, I (i) suggest that there are more sources of authoritative reasons and purposes than the sorts of deliberators that are Bazargan-Forward’s focus; and (ii) suggest that the connection between causation and moral accountability implied by Bazargan-Forward’s view undergenerates results in some cases and overgenerates in others. Consequently, the view has trouble accounting for various forms of moral luck.

Suppose that Billy and Suzy each throw a rock at window, and either rock is sufficient to shatter the window. While some consider this a paradigmatic case of causal overdetermination, in which multiple cases are sufficient for an outcome, others consider it a case of joint causation, in which multiple causes are necessary to bring about an effect. Some hold that every case of overdetermination is a case of joint causation underdescribed: at a maximal level of description, every cause is necessary to bring about the outcome in precisely the way that it occurs.

This paper shows the latter principle to be false. I introduce a novel class of events that are insensitive to the additive force of multiple causes. They are to be contrasted with sensitive events, which physically and counterfactually vary according to the number and sorts of causes they have. I argue that sensitive effects are symptoms of joint causation; insensitive effects are symptoms of overdetermination. Insensitive effects resulting from multiple causes cannot be classified as "joint causation underdescribed," but only as overdetermination.

I suggest that cases of "trumping preemption" should be understood as cases of overdetermination with insensitive effects. Consequently, Lewis' influence account of causation cannot handle these cases.

According to Schaffer (2000), "trumping preemption" is a category of redundant causation distinct from early and late preemption and from overdetermination. Schaffer holds that trumping isn't a case of late preemption because both causal processes "run to completion," and trumping isn't overdetermination because there is only one actual cause. I outline several different kinds of causal completion, and show how Schaffer's argument depends on an ambiguity between two types of causal completion. I then argue that the putative causal asymmetry between causal processes in cases thought to be trumping preemption generates early preemption or overdetermination rather than trumping. This conclusion reveals important lessons about the relationship between causation and laws.

Widespread causal overdetermination is often levied as an objection to nonreductive theories of minds and objects. In response, nonreductive physicalists have argued that the type of overdetermination generated by their theories is different from the sorts of coincidental cases involving multiple rock-throwers, and thus not problematic. This paper pushes back. I argue that attention to differences between types of overdetermination discharges very few explanatory burdens, and that overdetermination is a bigger problem for the nonreductive metaphysician than previously thought.

It is clear that the questions of how to understand free will and mental causation are deeply connected, for events of seemingly free choosing are mental events that appear capable of causing other mental and physical events (e.g., intentions to pet the cat, cat-pettings). It is thus surprising that the free will and mental causation debates have proceeded largely independently of each other.

Here we aim to make progress in exploring their connections. We show that the problems of free will and of mental causation are special cases of a more general problem, concerning whether and how mental events of a given type may be causally efficacious, given their apparent causal irrelevancy for effects of the type in question. We also identify parallels between certain of the standard responses to the two problems: we argue that hard determinism is parallel to eliminativist physicalism; and we use this parallel to identify an objection to hard determinism that is better than one common objection to this position.

We next argue that compatibilism is parallel to non-reductive physicalism; here our primary aim is to elucidate the deep structural similarity between the strategies underlying these accounts, which similarity supports compatibilism's viability as a principled intermediate position between hard determinism and libertarianism.

Traditionally, causal overdetermination is taken to involve multiple causes whose actual causal contributions are sufficient to bring about an effect. For example: Billy and Suzy each throw a rock through a window, and the actual impact of each rock is individually sufficient to shatter the window.

But certain special cases of redundant causation defy easy categorization due to this presumption. In Yablo's 'smart rock' case, Billy has a normal rock while Suzy has a satellite-guided rock poised to shatter the window if Billy's rock doesn't. Either is sufficient to shatter the window, but only one rock is intuitively the cause. In Schaffer's 'trumping preemption,' two magicians cast spells, each of which is sufficient to bring about an effect, but only one of which is intuitively the cause. In Sartorio's 'colliding bullets' case, two bullets are discharged with speed sufficient to kill Victim, but collide midstream such that their combined force is necessary to bring about Victim's death.

Rather than viewing these cases as preemption or joint causation, I argue that we should view them as special sorts of overdetermination-- overdetermination involving counterfactual, rather than actual, causal sufficiency of one cause. An event g1 in a class of causes C counterfactually overdetermines an effect e if had other causes g2, g3, g4, etc. not occurred, g1 would have brought about e in precisely the way that it happened. I develop this new notion of counterfactual overdetermination and show how it accounts for several controversial cases of redundant causation. I then suggest that there is theoretical pressure to admit that merely possible causes are causes simpliciter.

Proponents of grounding often describe the notion as "metaphysical causation" involving determination and production relations similar to causation. This paper argues that the similarities between grounding and causation are merely superficial. I show that there are several sorts of causation that have no analogue in grounding; that the type of "bringing into existence" that both involve is extremely different; and that the synchronicity of ground and the diachronicity of causation make them too different to be explanatorily intertwined.

Debates over what is fundamental assume that what is fundamental must be either a “top” level (roughly, the biggest or highest-level thing), or a “bottom” level (roughly, the smallest or lowest-level things). Here I sketch a middle view between top-ism and bottom-ism, that a middle level could be the most fundamental, and argue for its possibility. I then suggest that this view satisfies the desiderata of asymmetry, irreflexivity, intransitivity, and well-foundedness of fundamentality, and that it is on par with the explanatory power of top-ism and bottom-ism.

This paper develops and articulates a metaphysics of intersectionality, the idea that multiple axes of oppression cross-cut each other. Though intersectionality is often described through metaphor, I suggest that rigorous theories of intersectionality can be formulated using the tools of contemporary analytic metaphysics. A central tenet of intersectionality theory, that intersectional identities are inseparable, can be framed in terms of explanatory unity. Inseparability should not be understood as modal inseparability or conceptual inseparability, I argue. Further, intersectionality is best understood as metaphysical and explanatory priority of the intersectional category over its constituents, comparable to metaphysical priority of the whole over its parts.

The social categories to which we belong—Latino, disabled, American, woman— causally influence our lives in deep and unavoidable ways. One might be pulled over by police because one is Latino, or one might receive a COVID vaccine sooner because one is American. Membership in these social categories most often falls outside of our control. This paper argues that membership in social categories constitutes a restriction on human agency, creating a situation of non-ideal agency for most human individuals.

However, there are ways to resist the causal influence of social categories, and certain socially marginalized groups can be understood as attempting to do just this. I discuss two instances of social category resistance: gender pronouns and the rights of trans individuals. I suggest that the intentional declaration of gender pronouns (“she/her” or “they/them”) can be understood as an attempt to resist the causal powers of social categorization. Similarly, one among many reasons to support the rights of trans individuals is that their self-declaration of gender identity can be viewed as a reclamation of agency in the face of causal constraints imposed by socially defined and imposed gender categories. This lesson can be generalized to people belonging to a broad range of marginalized groups.

This paper identifies a type of linguistic phenomenon new to feminist philosophy of language: biased evaluative descriptions. Biased evaluative descriptions (BEDs) are those descriptions whose well-intended positive surface meanings are inflected with implicitly biased content. Biased evaluative descriptions are characterized by three main features: (i) they have roots in implicit bias or benevolent sexism, (ii) their application is counterfactually unstable across dominant and subordinate social groups, and (iii) they encode stereotypes.

After giving several different kinds of examples of biased evaluative descriptions, I distinguish them from similar linguistic concepts, including backhanded compliments, slurs, insults, epithets, pejoratives, and dog-whistles. I suggest that the framework of traditional Gricean implicature cannot account for BEDs. I discuss some challenges to the distinctiveness and evaluability of BEDs, including intersectional social identities. I conclude by discussing the social significance and moral status of BEDs. Identifying BEDs is important for a variety of social contexts, from the very general and broad (political speeches) to the very particular and small (bias in academic hiring).

We often reason about what our lives would have been like if we had belonged to different social groups: “If I had been African-American, being pulled over by police would have been scarier”, or “If I had not been a woman, I would have had an easier time in that meeting.” This paper makes sense of such countersocial counterfactuals, conditionals whose antecedents run contrary to social facts. Though some countersocials are counterpossibles, not all of them are. Even counterpossible countersocials are non-vacuous. A hyperintensional framework for evaluating countersocials permits neutrality on the question of whether or not membership in certain social categories is an essential feature of individuals. I conclude by suggesting that a plausible similarity metric for countersocial counterfactuals must take into account the nature of unitary and intersectional social groups.

I offer a new way to understand the causal status of intersectional oppression. In the first part of the paper, I argue that social categories are literally causal: they are causes and effects. Social categories like Black figure into social counterfactuals and support social explanations. Social categories can also count as ontologically fundamental, on a certain conception of fundamentality.

In the second part of the paper, I suggest that different "levels" of social reality have differentially detailed causal profiles. For example, the category Black womanhood has a more detailed causal profile than womanhood or Blackness. Drawing on Stephen Yablo's idea that causes are proportionate to their effects in terms of causal detail, I argue that intersectional oppression can be understood as causation involving the appropriate level of causal detail.

This paper offers a metaphysical account of the interaction between intersectional social categories. Drawing on empirical research in economics and psychology, I suggest that cases of intersectional oppression are best understood as results of mixed joint causation of membership in both social categories. It is joint causation because membership in both social categories is necessary for the occurrence of a particular sort of oppression. It is mixed because membership in the multiple social categories is not merely additive; they mix and interact in particular ways that result in intersectional social oppression. For example, the way that a Black woman is treated in a position of power is jointly caused by her membership in multiple oppressed social categories.

This paper suggests that time travelling scenarios commonly depicted in science fiction introduce problems and dangers for the time traveller. If time travel takes time, then time travellers risk collision with past objects, relocation to distant parts of the universe, and time travel-specific injuries. I propose several models of time travel that avoid the dangers and risks of time travel taking time, and that introduce new questions about the relationship between time travel and spatial location.

In "Changing the Past" (2010), Peter van Inwagen argues that a time traveler can change the past without paradox in a growing block universe. After erasing the portion of past existence that generates paradox, a new, non-paradox-generating block can be "grown" after the temporal relocation of the time traveler.

I expand underlying mechanism of Van Inwagen's model: the time traveler's control over the location of the objective present. Van Inwagen's model is aimed at preventing paradox by changing the past, but it achieves something broader than paradox avoidance: it gives tools for a new model of time travel. I use van Inwagen's tools to develop a new kind of time travel in which in which the location of the objective present is shifted by the time traveler. I call this type of time travel Movable Objective Present, or MOP. After defining MOP, I argue that it is compatible with any theory of time that accepts hypertime, including presentism and moving spotlight theory.

This paper brings two fresh perspectives on Lewis’s theory of time travel. First: many key aspects and theoretical desiderata of Lewis’s theory can be captured in a framework that does not commit to eternalism about time. Second: implementing aspects of Lewisian time travel in a non-eternalist framework provides theoretical resources for a better treatment of time travel to the future. While time travel to the past has been extensively analyzed, time travel to the future has been comparatively underexplored. I make progress on this topic. Along the way, I discuss Lewis’s lesser-known time travel oeuvre, especially his volume of correspondence and lectures on the topic collected in Beebee and Fisher (2020) and Janssen-Lauret & MacBride (forthcoming). Lewis’s body of unpublished work on time travel yields fruitful insights into his broader thinking on the subject.

One often hears: "If time travel were possible, someone could go back in time and kill Hitler, and save millions of lives." But little thought has been given to the background issues surrounding such a claim: if time travel were possible, what sorts of ethical puzzles, dilemmas, and obligations would it introduce? For example, would one be morally permitted or even morally obligated to go back in time and kill Hitler? Would less dramatic interventions, such as travelling back in time to prevent a single car accident, also be subject to moral obligation?

This paper is dedicated to these and similar ethical questions that arise from the possibility of time travel. I articulate the ethical puzzles of time travel and divide them into three different categories: permissibility puzzles, obligation puzzles, and conflicts between past and future selves. In each category, I suggest that ethical problems involving time travel are not as dissimilar to parallel “normal” ethical puzzles as one might think.

Should intuitions play a role in a theory of causation? Metaphysicians often bristle at the idea, while at the same time utilizing intuitions (“Intuitively, Billy rock is not the cause of the window’s shattering” or “Intuitively, Barack Obama’s failure to water my plant is not a cause of my plant’s death”) as evidence for or against their theories. Metaphysicians often hold that whether or not c is a cause of e has nothing to with our intuitions our mere thoughts about them, yet most metaphysical and causal theorizing centrally involves intuitions. Some metaphysicians recognize the relevance of intuitions to metaphysics more generally, whereas others see the use of such intuitions as the exemplifying what’s wrong with contemporary metaphysics. This paper clears the ground on the relationship between metaphysical theories of causation and intuitions about causation, including those gathered by experimental philosophers.

I clarify the questions at hand and I give a taxonomy of roles for intuitions in the metaphysics of causation, focusing on case studies of intuition-based problems for theories of causation. I sketch several reasons that metaphysicians might be compelled to incorporate folk intuitions into their theories, and then discuss methodological obstacles to utilizing folk data in metaphysical theories of causation.

This paper argues that causal idealism, the view that causation is a product of mental activity, should be considered a competetitor to contemporary views that incorporate human thought and agency into the causal relation. Weighing contextualism, contrastivism, or pragmatism about causation against causal idealism results in at least a tie with respect to the virtues of these theories.

You are sitting in a fancy restaurant. After an extensively prepared, multi-course meal, out comes the dessert course: an unmodified but perfectly juicy, fresh peach. Many restaurants serve such unmodified or barely-modified foods, intending them to count as culinary art. This paper takes up the question of whether such unmodified foods, served in the relevant institutional settings, do count as culinary art.

Drawing on debates about the metaphysics of art, I compare and contrast the case of unmodified food to Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917), pointing out relevant similarities and differences between the cases. I propose and defend an institutionalist account of unmodified culinary art, arguing that a dish served in the appropriate culinary institutional setting does count as culinary art. Finally, I apply the results to the case of sashimi, arguing that unmodified raw fish meets the criteria for culinary art.

This paper examines both creepiness and the distinctive reaction had to creepiness, being “creeped out.” The paper defends a response-dependent account of creepiness in terms of this distinctive reaction, contrasting our preferred account to others that might be offered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of detecting creepiness.

This article gives an overview of David Lewis' theories of causation, and traces their influence to present day "hot topics" in metaphysics, including grounding, counterfactual skepticism, and metaphysical laws.

This article (co-written with Peter van Inwagen and Meghan Sullivan) is an overview of the central topics of metaphysics, including social metaphysics.