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The Westray Mine Disaster And Its Aftermath: The Politics Of Causation, Eric Tucker

Eric M. Tucker

Causation analysis is densely political in at least three ways. First, because causation is crucial to our system of attributing moral, legal, and political responsibility, causation arguments are advanced for purely instrumental purposes. They do political work. Second, because any particular occurrence is the outcome of an almost infinite number of antecedent events, “but for” causation analysis produces trivial results. A judgment about causal significance is required and will depend, in part, on the goals of the analysis. The choice of goals is political, but unstated goals and hidden assumptions often exclude consideration of some possible causes as significant. Theses …

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Death By Consensus: The Westray Story, Eric Tucker, Harry Glasbeek

Eric M. Tucker

The paper will proceed as follows. It tells the Westray story in two parts, first, the decision to set up the mine and, second, the operation of the mine. These events illuminate the salience of the broader political economic context to an understanding of what happened. Further, the story gives the lie to the assumptions which underpin health and safety regulation. Next, the paper details the implications of the political economy and the prevailing ideology for the enforcement of health and safety regulation. The paper then critically examines a component of, or prop for, the consensus theory which postulates that …

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