Declarations of war do not cause war. Declarations of peace do not cause peace. Those actions are correlated with the beginnings and ends of conflicts but surely no-one would mistake them for causes?
You’re assuming monocausalism here. Nothing has ever been monocausal.
The main determiner of whether causal language should be used is whether it can be affected by an intervention on the part of an agent. You’re trying to frame the decisions of states as fully determined by economics, they aren’t, but even if they were, that wouldn’t make them non-agentic, having economic behavior is more or less the definition of agency.
C’mon. This is weaksauce, you should concede those were terrible examples. I never said anything was monocausal but as a candidate for causes of war ‘war was declared’ wouldn’t be in the running.
There are even declarations that do bring civilizations closer to war, like certain religious proclamations in history and other mass movements. There are plenty of entities from discourse-space you could defend as having causal power.
You’re assuming monocausalism here. Nothing has ever been monocausal.
The main determiner of whether causal language should be used is whether it can be affected by an intervention on the part of an agent. You’re trying to frame the decisions of states as fully determined by economics, they aren’t, but even if they were, that wouldn’t make them non-agentic, having economic behavior is more or less the definition of agency.
C’mon. This is weaksauce, you should concede those were terrible examples. I never said anything was monocausal but as a candidate for causes of war ‘war was declared’ wouldn’t be in the running.
There are even declarations that do bring civilizations closer to war, like certain religious proclamations in history and other mass movements. There are plenty of entities from discourse-space you could defend as having causal power.