Overdetermination and the Counterfactual Account of Liability

Speaker: Dr Todd Karhu (King’s College London)

Chair: Prof. George Letsas (UCL Laws)

Please note that the time allocated for this colloquia will be devoted to discussion.

About the Talk:

Jane wrongfully chops off someone’s finger. According to the Counterfactual Account of compensatory liability, she is required to make her victim no worse off than he would have been had she not acted. Suppose, however, that John was about to chop off the same finger anyway. Now the Counterfactual Account appears to imply, quite implausibly, that Jane owes her victim no compensation at all. This and other cases of overdetermination have been widely taken to refute the view. I aim to revitalise the Counterfactual Account by showing how to overcome the overdetermination problem. What ultimately emerges is a unified theory of compensation that delivers satisfactory verdicts about liability across a wide variety of overdetermination cases, and vindicates the use of a simple counterfactual test in standard ones.

About the Speaker:

Todd Karhu is Senior Lecturer at King’s College London, where he teaches in the School of Law and directs the LLB programme in Politics, Philosophy & Law. He works in moral, political, and legal philosophy, with particular interests in corrective justice, the ethics of harm, and intergenerational justice. His work has appeared in journals including Analysis, Law and Philosophy, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and he is currently writing a book on moral liability and compensation.

About the Institute:

ILPP brings together political and legal theorists from Law, Political Science and Philosophy and organises regular colloquia in terms 2 and 3. Read more about the Institute’s work.

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