 As we will see below in  section 5.2,  the legal economists and other utilitarians believe that legal rules attaching liability to those who cause harm, have as their rationale preventing sub-optimal levels of such harms; they do this by incentivizing future behavior by the placement of liability (or rewards) on past behavior. On such a view, causation in the law might well mean something different than it means when used in ordinary or scientific discourse—for to gain incentive effects from cause-based liability rules, one might well identify “cause” with the raising of conditional probability, as the legal economists have indeed often urged.