Cause and essence

Essence and causation are fundamental in metaphysics, but little is said about their relations. Some essential properties are of course causal, as it is essential to footprints to have been caused by feet. But I am interested less in causation's role in essence than the reverse: the bearing a thing's essence has on its causal powers. That essencemight make a causal contribution is hinted already by the counterfactual element in causation; and the hint is confirmed by the explanation essence offers of something otherwise mysterious, namely, how events exactly alike in every ordinary respect, like the bolt'ssuddenly snapping and its snapping per se, manage to disagree in what they cause. Some prior difference must exist between these events to make their causal powers unlike. Paradoxically, though, it can only be in point of a property, suddenness, which both events possess in common. Only by postulating a difference in themanner — essential or accidental — of the property's possession is the paradox resolved. Next we need an account of causation in which essence plays an explicit determinative role. That account, based on the idea that causes should becommensurate with their effects, is thatx causesy only if nothing essentially poorer would have done, and nothing essentially richer was needed.Something like the present approach to causation was proposed in the last two chapters of my dissertation (1986, Things, University of California, Berkeley). In Yablo (1987) the essentialist half of the story is laid out in some detail, and the connection with causation briefly indicated; this paper takes the cause/essence connection as its main object. I am grateful to Louise Antony, Paul Boghossian, Sin Yee Chan, Donald Davidson, John Drennan, Graeme Forbes, Sally Haslanger, Jaegwon Kim, Louis Loeb, Vann McGee, Sarah Patterson, Gideon Rosen, Larry Sklar, William Taschek, Ken Walton, and Crispin Wright for discussion and advice. Research for this paper was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.