Some have argued that no analysis of counterfactual conditionals can succeed without appealing to causal notions. Such authors claim that, in determining what would transpire had some events gone differently, we hold fixed everything that is causally independent from those events. Call this view Causal Independence. Some have argued that we need Causal Independence to accommodate intuitive judgments about certain kinds of counterfactuals in indeterministic worlds. The aim of this paper is to show that, contra these authors, Causal Independence systematically (...) delivers counterintuitive results for a certain subset of such counterfactuals-namely, those involving causation by double prevention. I conclude that intuitions about such counterfactuals do not motivate Causal Independence, at least in any form in which it has thus far been articulated. However, I suggest that a refined Causal Independence thesis that presupposes a kind of causal pluralism might be able to accommodate these intuitions, though such a refined version of Causal Independence may not conflict with reductive analyses of causal notions that appeal to counterfactuals after all. (shrink)

Jonathan Schaffer (2004 ) proposes an ingenious amendment to David Lewis's semantics for counterfactuals. This amendment explicitly invokes the notion of causal independence, thus giving up Lewis's ambitions for a reductive counterfactual account of causation. But in return, it rescues Lewis's semantics from extant counterexamples. I present a new counterexample that defeats even Schaffer's amendment. Further, I argue that a better approach would be to follow the causal modelling literature and evaluate counterfactuals via an explicit postulated causal structure. This alternative (...) approach easily resolves the new counterexample, as well as all the previous ones. Up to now, its perceived drawback relative to Lewis's scheme has been its non-reductiveness. But since the same drawback applies equally to Schaffer's amended scheme, this becomes no longer a point of comparative disadvantage. (shrink)

Before a fair, indeterministic coin is tossed, Lucky, who is causally isolated from the coin-tossing mechanism, declines to bet on heads. The coin lands heads. The consensus is that the following counterfactual is true: (M:) If Lucky had bet heads, he would have won the bet. It is also widely believed that to rule (M) true, any plausible semantics for counterfactuals must invoke causal independence. But if that’s so, the hope of giving a reductive analysis of causation in terms of (...) counterfactuals is undermined. Here I argue that there is compelling reason to question the assumption that (M) is true. (shrink)

I discuss three observations about backtracking counterfactuals not predicted by existing theories, and then motivate a theory of counterfactuals that does predict them. On my theory, counterfactuals quantify over a suitably restricted set of historical possibilities from some contextually relevant past time. I motivate each feature of the theory relevant to predicting our three observations about backtracking counterfactuals. The paper concludes with replies to three potential objections.