There’s some fairly direct experimental evidence supporting your hypothesis that people’s causal judgments are influenced by judgments of wrong-doing. Joshua Knobe (dscussed here) concluded from his research in the area that
causal attributions are not purely descriptive judgments. Rather, people’s willingness to say that a given behavior caused a given outcome depends in part on whether they regard the behavior as morally wrong.
But, it’s not clear that the broader pattern (never mind BP for a moment) represents a mistake. In Cause and Norm , Knobe and Christopher Hitchcock argue that the point of the concept of one particular event causing another is to pick out appropriate targets for intervention.
There’s some fairly direct experimental evidence supporting your hypothesis that people’s causal judgments are influenced by judgments of wrong-doing. Joshua Knobe (dscussed here) concluded from his research in the area that
But, it’s not clear that the broader pattern (never mind BP for a moment) represents a mistake. In Cause and Norm , Knobe and Christopher Hitchcock argue that the point of the concept of one particular event causing another is to pick out appropriate targets for intervention.