Samuel Lee

New York University, Philosophy, Graduate Student

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I'm completing my PhD in philosophy at New York University. I work in metaphysics, ethics, the philosophy of action and the philosophy of science. My dissertation is on the metaphysics of causation.
Address: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/samuellee

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Collective Actions, Individual Reasons and the Metaphysics of Consequence

I defend the view that individual agents have instrumental moral reasons for and against contribu... more I defend the view that individual agents have instrumental moral reasons for and against contributing to collective actions. I distinguish three versions of this view found in the literature and argue that only one withstands scrutiny: the version on which each individual contribution to a collective action is a cause of the latter's large-scale outcomes. The central difficulty with this view is its apparent incompatibility with leadings theories of causation. Against these theories I motivate a general structural principle about causation which enables instrumentalism to deliver the intuitively correct verdicts about individual agents' moral reasons in cases of collective action. * I am grateful to audiences at the CEPPA Conference in Moral and Political Philosophy at St. Andrews University and at the Higher Seminar at Linköping University for questions and comments on earlier versions of this paper. In particular I am grateful to Rowan Cruft, who was the commenter for my paper at the CEPPA conference, and to Fredrik Stjernberg, András Szigeti and Anton Skott. I would also like to thank Samuel Scheffler, Adam Lovett, Michael Strevens and Laura Franklin-Hall for their feedback on various drafts, and Mattias Gunnemyr for helpful discussion and written comments. Special thanks go to Caroline Torpe Touborg for both discussion and her incredibly helpful written feedback, and especially special thanks are owed to two anonymous referees for Ethics, the associate editors of the journal, and Victor Tadros, without whom this would have been a very different and far inferior paper. 1 I speak interchangeably of contributing to and participating in collective actions, and intend my use to correspond to ordinary usage. This contrasts with some philosophers, for whom participating in a collective action is a technical notion, such as Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age

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Building Low Level Causation out of High Level Causation

Synthese, 2021

I argue that high level causal relationships are often more fundamental than low level causal rel... more I argue that high level causal relationships are often more fundamental than low level causal relationships. My argument is based on some general principles governing when one causal relationship will metaphysically ground another—a phenomenon I term derivative causation. These principles are in turn based partly on our intuitive judgments concerning derivative causation in a series of representative examples, and partly on some powerful theoretical considerations in their favour. I show how these principles entail that low level causation can derive from high level causation, and in particular that neural causation can derive from mental causation. I then draw out several important consequences of this result. Most immediate among these are the implications the result has for aspirations to reduce high level causation to its low level counterpart. But the result also bears on the possibility of downward causation, the relationship between counterfactuals and causation, and the idea—familiar from both the literature on the exclusion problem and the literature on proportionality constraints on causation—that causal relationships at different levels compete for their existence.

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Collective Actions, Individual Reasons and the Metaphysics of Consequence

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Building Low Level Causation out of High Level Causation

Synthese, 2021

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Samuel Lee

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