Your comment helped me understand this discussion better. It seems I was indeed assuming causality in the stronger sense, though I now see there wasn’t much justification for this assumption. As you point out, the stronger sense would fail to vindicate many relationships we generally take to be causal.
I still feel reluctant to assert that marriage causes death from the data you provided. Maybe it’s because I’m not sure what type of link exists between marriage and higher rates of childbirth. Though it seems clear that married people have more children, I’m not sure it’s correct to say that marriage causes people to have more children. People often get married because they want to have children. Even when this is not the initial motivation, it seems odd to say that marriage explains why these people have children. By contrast, the link between smoking and cancer seems much more tight.
I haven’t thought much about whether the causal attributions we make in social science tend to be more similar to “marriage causes higher rates of childbirth” or to “smoking causes higher rates of cancer”.
Your comment helped me understand this discussion better. It seems I was indeed assuming causality in the stronger sense, though I now see there wasn’t much justification for this assumption. As you point out, the stronger sense would fail to vindicate many relationships we generally take to be causal.
I still feel reluctant to assert that marriage causes death from the data you provided. Maybe it’s because I’m not sure what type of link exists between marriage and higher rates of childbirth. Though it seems clear that married people have more children, I’m not sure it’s correct to say that marriage causes people to have more children. People often get married because they want to have children. Even when this is not the initial motivation, it seems odd to say that marriage explains why these people have children. By contrast, the link between smoking and cancer seems much more tight.
I haven’t thought much about whether the causal attributions we make in social science tend to be more similar to “marriage causes higher rates of childbirth” or to “smoking causes higher rates of cancer”.
[Retracted]