ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that if one characterizes a person as foolhardy and thereby explains his foolhardy conduct, one is subsuming that conduct under a law-like hypothetical or series of such to the general effect that whenever circumstances in which he is placed are of the appropriate sort, he will take unreasonable risks, etc. The term 'cause' is one of the snare words in the philosophical lexicon. Failure to attend to the variety of ways in which it is employed is one of the sources of the confusions that surround the traditional controversy over the freedom of the will. For the present the author is concerned with 'cause' either in the Humean sense of this term or, if this is alleged to be inadequate in certain respects, to the use of the term in scientific explanations of, say, physical or physiological events, in that sense of the term in which it is in fact employed in physics or physiology.
