The Error of Mechanistic Causality

The Law of Causality relates an entity and its actions, some misinterpret this law as relating antecedent circumstances to necessary consequent circumstances—for instance asserting a mechanistic notion of the motion of one billiard ball causing the motion of another, the implication being that we may dispense with the balls themselves and speak only of the motions. In a view such as this one, it is the motions of the objects which make up the antecedent circumstances, and these motions will result in necessary consequent motions. This idea is mistaken; the motions themselves do not act, rather they are the actions of the entities involved—it is the entities which act and cause. It is the billiard ball itself which acts and produces certain effects by certain means. “If one doubts this, one need merely substitute an egg or soap bubble with the same velocity for the billiard ball; the effects will be quite different.”¹

Objectivism accepts the universality of cause and effect. But it stresses that the principle of cause and effect by itself does not legislate that all cause-effect relations are deterministic (such that one and only one outcome is possible from–and indeed necessitated by–a given set of antecedent circumstances). Nor does the principle of causality tell us which specific actions an entity can take in a given context; it tells us only that an entity must act in accordance with its nature; it cannot act in contradiction to it.²