Mysteries of Actual Causation: It’s Complicated

This chapter explores a number of issues raised by recent formal and empirical work on actual causation. It is argued that claims about actual causation have a number of features that are different from those possessed by other sorts of causal claims such as so-called type level claims. One consequence is that claims about actual causation should not be regarded as grounds or foundations for these other sorts of causal claims. Instead actual cause claims should be thought of as answers to certain kinds of distinctive questions about causal structure but not as providing answers to the sorts of causal questions that are instead associated with other sorts of causal claims. In addition, it is not clear that there is a single unitary notion of actual causation. This chapter suggests that some actual cause claims have to do with causal selection (picking out certain causes from a larger set of causally relevant factors, as when a dropped match but not oxygen is selected as the cause of a fire). Such selection-based judgments are influenced by normality considertations. By contrast, in other cases, actual cause judgments seem less influenced by considerations related to normality and instead seem to track a distinct notion that I call actual causal contribution. The consequences of this for modeling actual cause judgments and for their empirical investigation are briefly considered