Moral Responsibility Cascade

The Cascade Decay Principle Solution to Infinite Moral Liability

If moral responsibility follows causal chains without principled limits, we face what I call the Responsibility Cascade—an exponential explosion of moral liability that destroys individual agency through what I term “causal democracy.” This paper develops a novel theoretical framework showing how infinite backward extension creates Moral Event Horizons beyond which responsibility attribution becomes meaningless, and proposes the Cascade Decay Principle as a solution.

The cascade begins innocuously. John strikes Mary—clearly John bears responsibility. But John’s aggression stems from childhood trauma inflicted by his father, who himself suffered abuse from his parents, who were shaped by wartime trauma, economic depression, cultural norms maintained by millions of individuals, genetic predispositions inherited through evolutionary history, and ultimately cosmic events determining universal initial conditions.

This creates what I call Causal Democracy—the egalitarian distribution of responsibility across all causal contributors, which paradoxically eliminates individual moral agency. If everyone is equally responsible for everything through infinite causal participation, then no one bears special responsibility for anything.

The mathematical structure proves illuminating. Let R(n) represent responsibility at causal step n backward from the original action. If responsibility distributes equally across causal contributors, and each step multiplies contributors exponentially, then individual responsibility R(n) = R₀/k^n, where k > 1 represents the branching factor. As n approaches infinity, R(n) approaches zero—individual responsibility vanishes entirely.

This Responsibility Vanishing Point reveals the cascade’s destructive logic. Infinite backward extension doesn’t increase total responsibility but dilutes individual responsibility to mathematical insignificance. The more causal factors we include, the less any single factor matters morally.

But the cascade creates additional problems beyond dilution. Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control theory requires agents to be “ultimately originating” sources of their actions. Infinite causal chains eliminate ultimate origination entirely—every action becomes the inevitable consequence of factors beyond any agent’s control.

Yet their analysis misses the temporal dimension. Even if John lacks ultimate origination, he might exercise proximate origination—direct causal efficacy at the moment of action. The cascade threatens even this weaker form of agency by making proximate causation infinitesimally small within infinite causal networks.

Susan Wolf’s Reason View fares better—moral responsibility requires ability to act in accordance with reason. But the cascade undermines this capacity by making rational deliberation meaningless. If your decision is the inevitable outcome of infinite prior causation, rational deliberation becomes mere illusion of agency.

P.F. Strawson’s reactive attitudes theory offers different resources. Perhaps responsibility reflects emotional responses rather than causal facts. We hold people responsible when we experience resentment, gratitude, or indignation toward them. The cascade cannot eliminate these emotional responses even if it eliminates metaphysical responsibility.

But this solution faces the Emotional Arbitrariness Problem. If responsibility reduces to emotional reactions, then moral responsibility becomes subjective and unstable. Moreover, understanding infinite causation should affect our reactive attitudes—we should feel less resentment toward John once we understand his complete causal history.

The cascade also generates Temporal Justice Paradoxes. If present agents bear responsibility for past actions through causal inheritance, they simultaneously bear responsibility for future consequences of present actions. This creates infinite moral burden extending in both directions through time.

Consider intergenerational justice. If current Americans bear responsibility for slavery through causal inheritance (benefiting from slave-built wealth, inheriting racist institutions), they should provide reparations. But following the same logic, they bear responsibility for all future consequences of current actions, creating unlimited moral obligations.

The temporal paradox intensifies with collective action problems. Climate change results from billions of individual decisions across generations. The cascade makes every person throughout history partially responsible for current climate crisis. But this dilutes responsibility so broadly that no effective response becomes possible—everyone is responsible, so no one is especially obligated to act.

I propose the Moral Event Horizon Theory to resolve these paradoxes. Just as black holes create event horizons beyond which information cannot escape, moral responsibility creates event horizons beyond which causal information becomes morally irrelevant.

The moral event horizon occurs where causal efficacy falls below agency threshold—the minimum level of influence required for meaningful moral assessment. Beyond this horizon, causal factors contribute to outcomes but lack sufficient influence to generate moral responsibility.

This creates bounded responsibility without arbitrary cutoffs. The boundary emerges naturally from the mathematics of causal influence rather than conventional stipulation. Causal factors beyond the moral event horizon remain causally relevant while becoming morally irrelevant.

The Cascade Decay Principle formalizes this intuition. Moral responsibility decays exponentially with causal distance, weighted by intentionality coefficients reflecting agents’ awareness and control. Intentional actions maintain responsibility longer than unintentional consequences, creating natural boundaries around moral liability.

Mathematically: R(n) = R₀ × e^(-λn) × I(n), where λ represents decay constant and I(n) represents intentionality weighting. This generates bounded responsibility that reflects both causal structure and moral intuitions about intentional agency.

Novel thought experiments illuminate the theory’s implications:

The Time Travel Assassin: You travel back and prevent your grandfather’s murder, saving lives but causing different deaths through altered history. Are you responsible for these new deaths? The cascade suggests infinite responsibility, but moral event horizon theory limits liability to reasonably foreseeable consequences of intentional actions.

AI Decision Chains: An AI system makes harmful decisions based on training data reflecting human biases. Responsibility cascades through programmers, data collectors, original bias creators, and societal structures. The moral event horizon identifies key decision points where human agency exercised sufficient influence to generate responsibility.

Genetic Determinism Scenarios: Person X commits violence due to genetic predispositions inherited from ancestors. The cascade extends responsibility to parents, grandparents, and evolutionary history. But genetic inheritance operates below the intentionality threshold—genes influence behavior without constituting moral agency.

The theory also resolves McKenna’s conversational challenges. McKenna argues that moral responsibility involves ongoing conversation between agents. The cascade threatens this by making everyone conversationally relevant to every action. Moral event horizons identify agents sufficiently causally connected to participate meaningfully in moral conversation.

Cross-cultural analysis reveals interesting variations. Eastern karma systems already incorporate cascade-like thinking—actions generate consequences across lifetimes through causal continuity. But karma includes built-in decay mechanisms (purification through suffering, merit accumulation) that naturally bound responsibility.

Western individualistic cultures resist cascade thinking, emphasizing proximate agency and personal control. This cultural difference might reflect different solutions to the same logical problem—how to maintain functional moral systems despite infinite causal complexity.

The evolutionary psychology of responsibility attribution supports event horizon theory. Humans evolved moral emotions for small-scale social groups where causal chains remained traceable. Our responsibility intuitions naturally bound moral assessment to cognitively manageable causal networks.

This suggests that moral event horizons reflect cognitive constraints rather than metaphysical facts. We stop tracing responsibility when causal networks exceed our processing capacity, not when causation actually stops mattering.

But this cognitive constraint might be functionally optimal. Infinite responsibility attribution would paralyze moral agency—agents unable to act effectively when bearing unlimited liability for unlimited consequences. Natural selection favored bounded responsibility systems that enable effective moral behavior.

The theory generates testable predictions about moral judgment. People should assign responsibility inversely proportional to causal distance, weighted by intentionality. Experimental moral psychology should reveal consistent patterns matching the cascade decay principle across cultures.

Information theory provides additional resources. Moral responsibility might correlate with causal information—the amount of information about outcome contained in agent’s decision. Agents bear responsibility proportional to how much information about harmful consequences their decisions contained.

This connects to quantum mechanics analogies. Just as quantum measurement creates observer effects that bound physical information, moral assessment might create observer effects that bound moral information. The act of holding someone responsible changes the moral landscape being assessed.

The deepest implications concern free will compatibility. The cascade appears to support hard determinism—infinite causation eliminates genuine agency. But moral event horizon theory preserves compatibilist agency within bounded causal networks. Agents can be genuinely responsible for proximate consequences while embedded in broader causal systems.

This resolves the classical tension between determinism and responsibility. Causal determinism operates beyond moral event horizons without eliminating moral agency within those horizons. We achieve regional responsibility within global determinism.

The practical applications prove significant. Criminal justice systems should consider causal factors within moral event horizons while ignoring factors beyond those horizons. This creates principled rather than arbitrary limits on mitigating circumstances.

International justice faces similar applications. Historical injustices generate responsibility within temporal event horizons but not infinite temporal liability. This enables meaningful reparations without impossible infinite obligations.

Environmental ethics benefits especially. Climate responsibility extends across causal networks but decays according to cascade principles. Current generations bear primary responsibility for current emissions while sharing diminished responsibility for historical emissions based on causal distance and intentionality.

The theory ultimately reveals that moral responsibility emerges from bounded rationality rather than metaphysical agency. We assign responsibility within cognitively tractable networks because unlimited assignment destroys the very agency it attempts to assess.

Infinite moral responsibility dissolves morality through causal democracy. Bounded responsibility preserves morality through principled limitation. The cascade teaches us that moral wisdom lies not in perfect justice but in functional justice—responsibility systems that enable rather than paralyze moral agency.

We discover that ethics requires philosophical pragmatism about its own foundations. Moral responsibility serves human flourishing rather than cosmic justice, and infinite responsibility serves neither.