Does Obesity Shorten Life? Or is it the Soda? On Non-manipulable Causes

Non-manipulable factors, such as gender or race have posed conceptual and practical challenges to causal analysts. On the one hand these factors do have consequences, and on the other hand, they do not fit into the experimentalist conception of causation. This paper addresses this challenge in the context of public debates over the health cost of obesity, and offers a new perspective, based on the theory of Structural Causal Models (SCM).