Graduate Paul Henne ’11 discusses “Cause by Omission and Norm: not watering plants” on at 4: 00 pm Tuesday, March 1. Henne, currently a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University, majored in Philosophy at Lake Forest. His talk argues that people generally accept causation by omission – that the omission of some event causes some related event to occur. But there is a problem with this acceptance: the selection problem, or the difficulty of explaining the selection of a particular omissive cause out of the other causal conditions. 

Henne’s recently co-authored an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times Sunday Review called “The Data Against Kant.” Click here to read.