Abstract

Commonly we distinguish the strike of a match, as a cause of the match lighting, from the presence of oxygen, as a mere condition. In this paper I propose an account of this phenomenon, which I call causal selection. I suggest some reasons for taking causal selection seriously, and indicate some shortcomings of the popular contrastive approach. Chief among these is the lack of an account of contrast choice. I propose that contrast choice is often just the counterfactual scenario in which the effect does not occur: I suggest that if c causes e , then if e hadn't occurred, c wouldn't have occurred. I argue that this is a necessary condition on causation which causes meet but mere conditions fail.