Abstract

The worry that our actions are not free because they are compelled by their causal antecedents is addressed. The everyday notion of cause is a mix of different elements, and it has taken science a long time to develop a mature concept that separates out the objective content, providing us with a clean, precise, formalizable notion freed of the subjective and phenomological components. This chapter is about the historical developments that led to that notion, culminating in the interventionist conception of causation, accompanied by complementary developments in our understanding of the function of causal thinking. It is argued causation appears in mature science not as necessary connections written into the fabric of nature, but robust pathways that can be utilized as strategic routes to bringing about ends. Causal relations, in this form, function not as challenges to freedom, but handmaids to decision.