In "Causing, Enabling, and Counter[actual Dependence", 1 Penelope Mackie argues that the concept of an enabler, which I employed in "Causes, Enablers, and the Counter[actual Analysis", 2 fails to pick out a group of events which are not causes of the events which counterfactually depend on them. In this brief reply, I would like to indicate why I think Mackie's response is not persuasive.
I. According to the counter[actual analysis of event causation, for an event, c, to be a cause of an event, e, it is sufficient that e be connected to e by a series of counter[actual dependencies. 3 However, it seems clear to me that there are cases of counter[actual dependence that are not cases of causation. For example, the event that caused a previously wet match to become dry was, I claim, not a cause of the match's igniting, despite the fact that had the event that caused the match to become dry not occurred the match would not have ignited.
Such a event is an enabler of the match's igniting in the sense that it is an event that causes a thing (in this case, the match) to be in a state (in this case, the state of being dry) that (merely) makes it possible for another event (e.g., a striking of that match) to cause it to ignite. Enablers are events that scene setters for causation, but are not themselves causes of the events they enable. 4
Thus, if I am right about enablers' not being causes of the events they enable, the counter[actual analysis, if it is to escape counterexamples, would have to be revised so that no event, e', is counted as a cause of an event, e, if it is a mere enabler of e or any of e's causes, even though e' is an event on which either e or any event which is a cause of e counter[actually depends. However, though such a ploy may prevent the counter[actual analysis from being subject to certain counterexamples, it will subject it to a charge of circularity, unless a way can be found to analyze the concept of an enabler without employing the concept of a cause.