Causal Responsibility Through Omission

Intuitively, agents can be causally responsible for outcomes through failures to act—forgetting to salt the soup makes me causally responsible for the soup's bland taste. At the same time, it seems that not all our omissions make us causally responsible for outcomes—my failure to wear pink whilst making the soup doesn't make me responsible for anything. It has proven difficult to find a systematic way to distinguish between those seemingly inert omissions and those that connect us to outcomes. A central aim of this paper is to identify the feature in virtue of which some omissions make us causally responsible and others do not.