Causality and Responsibility

Attribution of responsibility, whether as blame or praise, always rests on a claim about causation. In order to be responsible for an event, a person must take an action that causes the event. This creates a philosophical puzzle. As philosophers, we tend to be skeptical about claims of causal knowledge. No matter how thoroughly we have studied a phenomenon, we say, we may not have gotten to the bottom of it and really understood its causal structure. But as judges and juries, we are prepared to conclude that a certain action has caused a certain result. How can we reconcile our philosophical and scientific skepticism with our practical credulity?