Actual Causality

How do we decide that someone is to blame for some misfortune, or that someone deserves credit for a favorable turn of events? Answering these questions and others depends on understanding how people represent and reason about the causal structure underlying specific events. The problem has plagued philosophers, legal and moral theorists, as well as psychologists. Recent years have seen enormous progress on this problem by using structural equations to model causal structure and defining causal relations in terms of counterfactuals. Much of this progress is due to the seminal work of Joe Halpern. His theories of blame and responsibility assignment and epistemic explanation are developed and expounded with full formal rigor in this seminal contribution.

Steven Sloman, Professor, Brown University, author of Causal Models: How People Think About the World and Its Alternatives and the forthcoming School of Thought: The Illusion of Knowledge and the Power of Collective Intelligence

What it might mean to say that some event was an 'actual cause' of some outcome—a conclusion that can be of crucial importance in deciding a legal case—is surprisingly difficult to characterize. This unique book describes the author's thoughtful quest to capture these subtleties in a formal language based on structural equations.

Philip Dawid, Emeritus Professor of Statistics, University of Cambridge

In this book, Joseph Halpern, a leading theorist of causality, develops a formal approach that revises and extends his earlier seminal work on counterfactual-based models for causation. The book includes a very informative, clear, and interesting discussion of the role and application of different features of causal models, and presents a new approach to modeling the causal features of responsibility, blame, and explanation. It is an important contribution to debates in philosophy and psychology about the nature of causal modeling and its application to real-world causation.

L. A. Paul, Eugene Falk Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill