The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 8: What Have You Done?
Page 7: Cause In Fact and Proximate Cause
No matter how convoluted the facts may be, all you’re looking for is whether the harm would have happened anyway,
and how closely related the act is to the harm.
Joe explaining
JOE
Or CAUSE IN FACT and PROXIMATE CAUSE, respectively.
If Simon wouldn’t have been hurt “but for” Joe’s making faces at the pigeon, then Joe’s act was a CAUSE IN FACT of the harm.
But PROXIMATE CAUSE has to do with how likely it was that the act would have caused that harm—how predictable it was.
Joe explaining
JOE
That one is more of a gut feeling than a logical analysis.
There was an essay by John W. Campbell (IIRC) in which he suggested that someone could get away with murder, by setting in motion hundreds of series of events that each had about a 1% chance of killing the intended victim.
Would people just look at the 1 successful series and dismiss the possibility of it being intentional, or would someone pick up on the odd behavior of the killer and convince others that there was intent to kill ?
Campbell was the guy most responsible for the “golden age of science fiction” in the postwar era, and this was published (posthumously?) as an editorial in Analog magazine. And I cannot find a readable version of it anywhere online! What am I not paying the Internet Archive for?
(Those folks are doing the lord’s work, by the way. Everyone with a few ducats to spare should kick a few to them at archive.org.)
On the plus side, I did find a 1985 Asimov magazine short story — “Unferno” — that for decades I’ve been wondering if I’d really read it or if it was just a weird dream.
I don’t seem to have answered your question…
I’m pretty sure I read it in one of the Analog magazines that I have. Since that is about 40 years of issues, finding the issue with it would be difficult.
I suppose If I start going through the issue in order I will find lots of other old treasures.
Wow, that is a treasure trove! If we were kids, I’d be bringing a sack of comics to school to see if you wanted to trade some of those for a week.