# Graded Causation and Defaults

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.1226 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.1226/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2013.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Causal Reasoning and Large Language Models: Opening a New Frontier for Causality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00050/) (2023)
- [BIG-Bench Extra Hard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19187/) (2025)
- [A Causal Analysis of Harm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05327/) (2022)
- [Direct Advantage Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06093/) (2021)
- [Actual Causality and Responsibility Attribution in Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00302/) (2022)
- [Automated Discovery of Functional Actual Causes in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10883/) (2024)
- [Causal-discovery-based root-cause analysis and its application in time-series prediction error diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06990/) (2024)
- [Did I do that? Blame as a means to identify controlled effects in reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00266/) (2021)
- [Beyond Single-Feature Importance with ICECREAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09779/) (2023)
- [Counterfactual-based Root Cause Analysis for Dynamical Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08106/) (2024)
- [Searching for Actual Causes: Approximate Algorithms with Adjustable Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07857/) (2025)
- [Reducing Causality to Functions with Structural Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07524/) (2023)
- [AUDITA: certified auditing and causal attribution of adverse outcomes in autonomous multi-agent systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22160/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has shown that judgments of actual causation are often influenced by consideration of defaults, typicality, and normality. A number of philosophers and computer scientists have also suggested that an appeal to such factors can help deal with problems facing existing accounts of actual causation. This paper develops a flexible formal framework for incorporating defaults, typicality, and normality into an account of actual causation. The resulting account takes actual causation to be both graded and comparative. We then show how our account would handle a number of standard cases.