At the recent Syracuse Metaphysics conference the following rather surprising little paradox arose. I think I know which way I want to get out of it, but I was rather surprised to see that a problem as simple and as pressing as this exists but hasn’t received much airplay.

I’ll set up the puzzle with an example. Chauncey the gardener, like every other gardener in the city, is on strike today. He hasn’t had a day off in a long time, so he can’t really decide what to do with it. After deciding that television is too boring and it’s too far to walk to the beach, he decides to head to the pub. And, like most people who get to the pub before lunchtime, he ends up good and drunk. He was getting drunk at just the time he would normally have been watering the flowers. But water the flowers he did not, and the flowers died. In the circumstances, (1) seems true and (2) false.

(1) Chauncey’s not watering the flowers caused them to die.
(2) Chauncey’s not watering the flowers caused him to get drunk.

Jonathan Schaffer said, in response to a question on this topic, that he would accept (2). The reasoning is fairly simple. He doesn’t believe that absences are distinct events from the commissions underlying them. So Chauncey’s not watering the flowers just is his going to the pub. And his going to the pub does cause him to get drunk. So by Leibniz’s Law, his not watering the flowers causes him to get drunk.

This is a pretty bad position to get stuck in, but Jonathan argued that there were only two ways out, and both of them are worse. The first way out is to deny absence causation and hence deny that (1) is true. I don’t think this position is awful, but let’s grant for now that it’s bad enough to want to avoid. The second way out is to deny that causes have to be immanent. If Chauncey’s not watering the flowers is some kind of abstraction, then it need not be his going to the pub, and hence our little Leibniz’s Law argument need not get off the ground. But causation is the cement of the universe, it has to relate immanent entities.

There’s a third option, I guess, and maybe one I want to accept. Absences are immanent events that are distinct from any commissions. This kind of position is of a par with those views that think there are a lot more events in the world than ordinary metaphysics allows. Now it’s a little strange to say that no only do absences exist but they are distinct immanent events, but maybe that’s better than the alternatives.

So here’s the puzzle. The following options look to be exhaustive.

1. Deny (1) because absences are never causes.
2. Deny (1) because there’s something wrong with this absence that makes it unfit to be a cause.
3. Deny that (1) entails (2) because absences are abstract while commissions like Chauncey’s going to the pub are concrete, and accept that abstracta can be causes.
4. Deny that (1) entails (2) because absences are distinct concrete events from any kind of any kind of commission.
5. Accept (2).

None of these options is particularly happy. I think my preference ordering is 4, 1, 3, 5, 2. But I don’t really have an argument for that – here we get down to comparing strengths of intuitions.