Benardete’s Less Radical Puzzles: Collective Causation or Retrocausation?

Abstract

In Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics, José Benardete presents puzzles of the ‘before-effect,’ which he interprets as cases of retrocausation where the effect happens temporally prior to its cause. Two of them are ‘less radical’ puzzles where the before-effect is allegedly caused by concrete physical events, such as infinitely many gong peals and gunshots. Hawthorne (2000), Laraudogoitia (2003), and Yi (2008) reject Benardete’s interpretation. They claim that the two puzzles describe not retrocausation but collective causation, where an event is caused by a fusion of many things, by a set of many things, or simply by many things as such without being caused by any one of the many things. I defend Benardete. Collective causation solves neither Benardete’s two puzzles nor their simpler variant, and the best causal interpretation of them is that they are cases of retrocausation.