Actual Causality and Normality. A Contemporary Debate.

The topic of the present work is actual causality. In particular, I focus causal modelling approach and its recent developments which suggest supplementing the analysis of actual causation with considerations about normality and typically. The specific accounts I consider are the purely structural definitions developed by Halpern and Pearl (2001, 2005) and Halpern (2016) and their combining with the theory of normality proposed by Halpern and Hitchcock (2015). To explore strengths and weaknesses, this improved account is confronted, on the one hand, with Blanchard and Schaffer's (2017) criticism and, on the other, with the experimental data collected by Kominsky et al. (2015) and Icard et al. (2017) about the effects of normality on our casual judgments.