Trans-World Causation Revisited

Abstract

In a recent paper, García-Ramírez (2012) has argued that Lewis’ counterfactual analysis of causation has the undesirable consequence of making trans-world causation possible. In this paper I argue, against García-Ramírez, that the possibility of trans-world causation cannot be derived from Lewis’ account of in-world causation, since there is no way of extending Lewis’ closeness relation among worlds into a similar closeness relation among pairs of worlds that is neither trivial nor ad-hoc.