Cost and Actual Causation

Abstract

I propose the purpose our concept of actual causation serves is minimizing various cost in intervention practice. Actual causation has three features: nonredundant sufficiency, continuity and abnormality; these features correspond to the minimization of exploitative cost, exploratory cost and risk cost in intervention practice. Incorporating these three features, a definition of actual causation is given. I test the definition in 66 causal cases from actual causation literature and show that this definition's application fit intuition better than some other causal modelling based definitions.