Um, this sounds not correct. The assassin causes the bodyguard to add the antidote; if the bodyguard hadn’t seen the assassin do it, he wouldn’t have so added. So if you compute the counterfactual the Pearlian way, manipulating the assassin changes the bodyguard’s action as well, since the bodyguard causally descends from the assassin.
Right—and according to Pearl’s causal beam method, you would first note that the guard sustains the coffee’s (non)deadliness-state against the assassin’s action, which ultimately makes you deem the guard the cause of the king’s survival.
Furthermore, if you draw the graph the way Neel seems to suggest, then the bodyguard is adding the antidote without dependence on the actions of the assassin, and so there is no longer any reason to call one “assassin” and the other “bodyguard”, or one “poison” and the other “antidote”. The bodyguard in that model is trying to kill the king as much as the assassin is, and the assassin’s timely intervention saved the king as much as the bodyguard’s.
Um, this sounds not correct. The assassin causes the bodyguard to add the antidote; if the bodyguard hadn’t seen the assassin do it, he wouldn’t have so added. So if you compute the counterfactual the Pearlian way, manipulating the assassin changes the bodyguard’s action as well, since the bodyguard causally descends from the assassin.
Right—and according to Pearl’s causal beam method, you would first note that the guard sustains the coffee’s (non)deadliness-state against the assassin’s action, which ultimately makes you deem the guard the cause of the king’s survival.
Furthermore, if you draw the graph the way Neel seems to suggest, then the bodyguard is adding the antidote without dependence on the actions of the assassin, and so there is no longer any reason to call one “assassin” and the other “bodyguard”, or one “poison” and the other “antidote”. The bodyguard in that model is trying to kill the king as much as the assassin is, and the assassin’s timely intervention saved the king as much as the bodyguard’s.