A refinement of the Hitchcock definition of actual causation

Models of actual causation seek to capture the causal relationships between two specific events within a given context, thereby contributing to a clear understanding of causality. A key challenge in constructing such models lies in providing a rigorous and well-defined notion of actual causation. Several influential approaches have been proposed in the literature, including the Hitchcock definition, the modified Halpern-Pearl definition, and the Halpern-Hitchcock definition. However, these definitions struggle to offer a unified solution to certain canonical problems, such as the switch example, the short circuit example, the bogus prevention example, and the switch-variant example. To address this limitation, we propose a definition for actual causation by formalizing and refining the Hitchcock definition. This refined definition offers a framework capable of resolving these canonical problems. Additionally, we present an analysis comparing these definitions, demonstrating that our proposed definition is more restrictive than both the Hitchcock and modified Halpern-Pearl definitions.