Assignment task: Review the four different categories of causes (intentional, inadvertent, mechanical, and accidental) discussed in the Causes Keywords entry. Choose two of these types of causes and generate your own example for each. Need Assignment Help?
Intentional: Saying a problem has an intentional cause means claiming that some person, group, or institution deliberately created the problem or knowingly allowed it to persist. For instance, several decades of lawsuits against the tobacco industry have argued that cigarette companies knowingly suppressed research about the harms of their products to harm consumers. As U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessner put it in a 2006 ruling against Philip Morris, the company "lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public... about the devastating health effects of smoking.
Inadvertent: If a problem has an inadvertent cause, that means that a person, group, or institution brought it about through mistakes, unawareness, or a lack of caution. In many cases, one policy might have unintended byproducts that create new problems.
Mechanical: Much of modern life is governed not by clear, intentional actors, but by large systems of bureaucracy and technology. With a mechanical cause, those systems create harm by working exactly the way they are supposed to. For example, the Food and Drug Administration has a rigorous system in place to ensure experimental medicines are safe for human testing. Some critics argue that the FDA's regulations work a little too well, preventing critically ill patients from accessing potentially beneficial treatments.6
Accidental: Sometimes, the forces of luck and fate intervene in human affairs to create accidental causes. Freak accidents do happen; tornadoes do touch down; lightning does strike, and sometimes twice. That said, it can often be difficult to draw the line between accidental and other types of cause. Consider a massive wildfire in California. Maybe a bolt of lightning started the fire (accidental cause), but the fire would not have spread so easily if not for a long-term drought caused by climate change (depending on whom you ask, either an intentional or an inadvertent cause).8 For people who might be held responsible for a problem, it can be beneficial to define a cause as purely accidental.