Actual Causation and Compositionality

Many theories of actual causation implicitly endorse the claim that if c is an actual cause of e, then either c causes e directly or every intermediary by which c indirectly causes e is itself both an actual cause of e and also an actual effect of c. We think this compositionality constraint is plausible. However, as we show, it is not always satisfied by the causal attributions ordinary people make. After showing that the compositionality constraint is not always satisfied by the causal attributions ordinary people make, we step back to consider what philosophers working on causation should do when the deliverances of their theories diverge from what ordinary people say.