Assigning Blame or Credit? Good Luck!

Trying to attribute blame, credit, or cause to a thing or an event is an easy way to illustrate the essential unity of things. Nothing happens on its own, and yet things happen spontaneously. The present moment is contingent on the sum total of everything that has occurred previously. The infinite regress backwards through those moments-- in search of cause-- shows us that dividing reality in to moments with distinct causes and effects is probably not an accurate way of mapping reality.

When I turn on a light-switch, do I make the light come on? If I hadn’t flipped the switch, the light wouldn’t be on, so obviously the light being on is contingent on me. Do I deserve all the credit? No. Without the electric company to generate the power and install the power lines, my switch-flipping would be meaningless. So then, the electric company made the light come on, and I share a relatively small role? Already, the seemingly rock-solid idea that I had made the light come on is looking blurry.

We could easily blur the lines further by asking how the power company generated the power, and identifying all the things that had to happen to allow them to do so-- never mind all of the things that lead the people to create and work for the power company. This line of thinking can go on forever, until we run out of knowledge and brain-power. Every time we go back a layer, searching for the causes, the tree of causation branches out. The more we investigate the cause of something, the harder it is to attribute a cause.

Now that we’ve realised that it’s impossible to give credit to any one entity for the light coming on, we must ask another question: does anyone deserve credit? After all, any person, plant or thing that contributed to the light coming on isn’t even responsible for its own existence.

Did you choose to be born? No, nor did you invest anything or contribute a modicum of effort-- and yet, here you are! Being born was something that happened to you spontaneously, and everything that you will ever do will be utterly contingent on it. According to scientists, every accomplishment we’ve ever made is ultimately contingent on an inert rock flying through space, with just the right combination of elements sloshing around on it.

It’s true that you began putting in the effort once you were born, but it doesn’t change the fact that putting in the effort would have been absolutely impossible without having been born. No matter how great your will to live is, and no matter how independent you have made yourself, you wouldn’t even have the chance to realise those things if it weren’t for events which occurred without your help and without your knowledge.

One approach is to look at this endless web of causation and say that there is one ultimate cause on which all things depend. This leads to the search for a primal and mysterious “first cause.” This also introduces an inconsistency whereby all things are caused, with the exception of the “first cause”-- which causes but is not itself caused.

A more simple approach is to consider that there is no cause and effect at all, except as a way of describing what is happening. If everything is contingent on everything else, can those things truly be considered separate? We take the chunk of reality that we’re currently aware of, divide it in to distinct entities, and then try to explain the relationship between those conceptual entities. Our inability to fully explain those relationships doesn’t reflect on reality, it reflects on the model.