Causes, Norms, and Decisions

Formal causal models and interventionist approaches have been applied to a wide range of problems in the philosophy of causation. In this workshop we want to explore two of these topics in particular.

The first topic is the role of prescriptive and descriptive norms in accounts of causation. Do we need to incorporate normality considerations into causal models in order to arrive at a descriptively adequate notion of causation? Or is it possible (and desirable) to arrive at a norm-free notion of causation? What is the relation of causation to other more obviously norm-laden concepts such as blame and responsibility?

The second topic is the relation between causality and rational decision. Can applying formal causal models and interventionist accounts of causation shed light on the debate between causal and evidential decision theories? Should (causal) decision theory explicitly incorporate the formalism of interventionist causal models? If yes, in which way? How well do evidentialist accounts of rational decision-making fit with interventionist accounts of causation?