Causation and Mill's Account
John is dead because he ate raw chicken.
What caused John's death? Was it the raw chicken, the salmonella it contained, his poor immune system or that he forgot to take his antibiotics? On Mills account, the cause of his death was the set of all conditions that were sufficient for death to invariably follow, unless any counteracting conditions were present (EG the antibiotics). But Mill's account of causation presents a number of problems. Firstly, Mill dismisses absent conditions as causes. The absence of antibiotics therefore can't be a cause, despite the fact that their presence would have prevented John's death. Secondly, he includes counterfactuals - John wouldn't have died had he not eaten the raw chicken. Thirdly, the sum of the conditions sufficient for the effect to follow is indeterminately large. It includes not only the conditions needed for John's death - poor immune system, salmonella etc but many more 'what if' conditions to be absent - that he didn't take his antibiotics, he didn't throw up the chicken, he didn't see a doctor earlier etc & ad infinitum. Absent conditions matter because they cover a great deal of everyday meaning of causation - EG the driver died because he wasn't wearing a seat belt. Counterfactuals are problematic because they turn sufficient conditions into necessary one. Suppose John's wine was poisoned as well. Then the statement he would not have died had he not eaten the chicken no longer holds true. The number of conditions necessary to be Mill's cause is problematic because it is simply too large to be meaningful to us. Mill rightly notes that no individual condition has any greater claim to be the cause than any of the others but it is beyond our cognitive abilities to list all the conditions present, let alone isolate them. So what do we do?