Absent causation and a critical review of a non-realistic theory

Causality in some contexts such as “Hamid’s failure to water his plants was a cause of their death.” and “Rickets is caused by a deficiency of vitamin D” can be called "absence causation". In this paper, the main question is whether the use of the term “cause” in such instances due to carelessness and a misuse of language or denotes something that is real and independent of our minds. Defending the first view can be called “anti-realism” in absence causation and the second as “anti-realism”. Helen Beebee is one of the contemporary philosophers that defend anti-realistic theory of absence causation. Her main argument is, in short, as Davidson said, that causation is a relation between events, whereas there are no negative events, therefore, there is no genuine absence causation. However, the main objection that those like her encounter is the common and strong linguistic intuition in sentences like Hamid’s inattentiveness to plants. Beebee has argued that our intuitions in these cases are wrong and the author strives to show that her arguments have failed to achieve this goal.