Instantaneous causation is causation where the cause and effect both occur at the same instant. It's a species of simultaneous causation, with the added condition that the events are instantaneous.
Suppose that instantaneous causation is possible. Then the following are compossible characters: the Judge, who instantaneously stamps death warrants, and the Executioner, who executes the person listed on the warrant in such a way that the very instant that the death warrant is stamped, the person is dead. Moreover, the Executioner takes no orders from dead people: she only executes people if the Judge was alive at the instant the warrant was stamped, and she executes no one else.
There is no metaphysical absurdity if the Judge stamps a warrant for your death—there is "merely" an injustice. But what if the Judge stamps a warrant for his own death?
Then, instantaneously, the Executioner executes the Judge. But then the Judge wasn't alive to stamp the warrant (and if he stamped it posthumously, then that doesn't count). But with no warrant stamped, the Executioner didn't do anything. And so the Judge both is and is not executed, which is absurd.
Now, we might conclude from this just that it's not possible for the Judge to stamp a warrant for his own death. And we could tell stories similar to banana-peel stories from the Grandfather Paradox: if the Judge were to go to stamp his own death warrant, he'd slip on a banana peel, or the stamp would be out of ink, or some other such thing would happen. But many philosophers are unsatisfied with such stories. It sure seems like it's no harder in principle (though it may be psychologically harder, though only if he knows it's his) for the Judge to stamp his own warrant than anyone else's.
It seems that a particularly good way to explain the impossibility of the setup, without any banana peels, is that instantaneous causation is not possible. In any case, people who think the Grandfather Paradox establishes the impossibility of time travel should think that this argument establishes the impossibility of instantaneous causation.
But what about the intuition one might have that instantaneous causation is possible? Here is a suggestion. Let the date of an event E be the temporal duration between the beginning of the universe and the event. (If the universe has no beginning, choose some other base for dates, with dates before it being negative.) Then our intuition that instantaneous causation is possible can have some justice done to it by saying that it is possible to have causation where the cause and effect have the same date, even though they are at different instants. These instants, then, have no duration between them. Thus, we could have the Judge and Executioner story work like this. There is a duration T (say, in seconds) from the beginning of the universe at which there is an instant, a, at which the Judge stamps his death warrant. And with no temporal gap, no duration in between, there is another instant b, at which the Judge is dead, also duration T after the beginning of the universe. (And between a and b there will be other instants, such as the instant when the Executioner sees the stamping and the instant when she initiates the causal process that kills the Judge. Quite possibly, in this story time is not dense.)
This does some justice to our intuition that there can be instantaneous causation. It's not quite instantaneous causation, but it's causation with no temporal extension, no temporal gap.
Acknowledgment: I got the warrant-stamping from Jon Kvanvig. It works better rhetorically than the instantaneous writing of the warrant that I initially had in mind.
