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The structural account of causation derives inter alia from Herbert Simon's work on causal order and was developed in Hoover's Causality in Macroeconomics and earlier articles. The structural account easily connects to, enriches, and illuminates graphical or Bayes net approaches to causal representation and is able to handle modular, nonmodular, linear, and nonlinear causal systems. The representation is used to illuminate the mutual relationship between causal structure and counterfactuals, particularly addressing the role of counterfactuals in Woodward's manipulationist account of causation and Cartwright's attack on ‘impostor counterfactuals’.

This chapter is a response to the arguments presented in the previous one. The previous chapter’s criticisms were directed against philosophers who argue that deficiencies in the standard story of action are to be addressed through the addition of states of different sorts from beliefs and desires to the causes of bodily movements. These philosophers fail to address the question of whether their story contains the causal notions that belong in an account of human agency or not. According to Michael Smith, this argument charges the standard story with incompleteness, which is a misleading notion. It was never suggested that the story required completion, even if it was posited that the causal role of agents ceases to exist in an events-based conception of the causal order. This chapter aims to show that the standard story stops making sense once it is accepted that a person’s acting is a matter of exercising a capacity he or she possesses as agent.

Many have inferred from the theory of relativity philosophical conclusions that are unjustified, such as that geometry is conventional or that spacetime should be reduced to the causal order among events. Other conclusions from the theory are justified, such as the “entanglement” of space with time and that space and time are deeply connected to matter and to the causal structure of the world. This chapter discusses what exactly the theories of special and general relativity tell us about space and time. What are the features that are genuinely novel, that follow from the new theories, that are part and parcel of a literal understanding of the theories, and that are robust in the sense of not being faced with contradictory “morals” that can also be drawn from these new theories?