It doesn't matter if a hurricane causes death or merely correlates with it, you have a responsibility to do the right thing. Failing to do so because you want an impractical distinction between causation and correlation is about as much an irrelevant moral platitude as any.

In any case, causation can look an awful lot like correlation when you've got many layers of indirection and noise to account for. So for practical purposes, they very well could be the same thing. You can shout "correlation is not causation" as loud as you like, but reality doesn't work on the basis of popular slogans.

And causation is pretty much completely irrelevant to law.