Abstract

Probabilistic theories of causation develop the idea that a cause's presence increases the likelihood of its effect as compared to its absence. The common explication, that a cause do so in a complete background context of other causes, is shown to rely on the intuition that a cause produces the probability increase on its own. This requires that, in the background context, the relevant probabilities express non-causal probabilistic laws, i.e., are nomic. A law holds of a kind; this kind determines what the absence of the cause amounts to. Derivatively, causal laws hold of kinds as well. Alleged counter-examples to the probability-increase intuition are shown not to take into account that the probabilities are nomic and to disregard that causal laws involve as a third relatum, besides cause-event and effect-event, a kind. It is shown that the nomic status of the probabilities to be compared entails that causal lawhood is irreflexive; causal lawhood is asymmetric if sufficiently many purported effects have at least two not nomically correlated alleged causes whose marginal probability is not nomic; causal lawhood is transitive iff the causal laws are about the same kind; there are no causal laws for disjunctive causes