 The notion of an intervention plays a somewhat (but only somewhat) similar role within manipulability theories of causation to Lewis’ similarity ordering. Like Lewis’ ordering, the characterization of an intervention tells us what should be envisioned as changed and what should be held fixed when we evaluate the sorts of counterfactuals that are relevant to elucidating causal claims. For example, on Pearl’s understanding of an intervention, in evaluating an interventionist counterfactual like “If \(X\) were to be changed by an intervention to such and such a value, the value of \(Y\) would change”, we are to consider a situation in which the previously existing causal relationship between \(X\) and its causes is disrupted, but all other causal relationships in the system of interest are left unchanged. A moment’s thought will also show that, as in Lewis’ account, both Pearl’s (in its setting version) and the characterization of interventions in terms of  M1–M4  rule out backtracking counterfactuals—for example, in evaluating a counterfactual of the form “if an intervention were to occur that changes \(E\), (where \(E\) is an effect of \(C)\), then \(C\) would change”, Pearl holds that we should consider a situation in which the relationship between \(E\) and its causes (in this case, \(C)\) is disrupted, but all other causal relationships are left unchanged, so that \(C\) still occurs, and the above counterfactual is false, as it should be. Moreover, there is a clear similarity between Lewis’ idea that the appropriate counterfactuals for analyzing causation are often counterfactuals the antecedents of which are made true by “miracles”, and the idea of an intervention as an exogenous change that disrupts the mechanism that was previously responsible for the cause event C—both of these notions function so as to provide \(C\) with the kind of “independent causal history” that allows us to distinguish the effects (if any) of \(C\) on \(E\) from the effects of other “confounding” variables on \(E\). From this perspective, one might think of an interventionist treatment of causation as explaining why Lewis’ account, with its somewhat ad hoc looking similarity ordering, works as well as it does—Lewis’ account works because his similarity ordering picks out roughly those relationships that are stable under interventions and hence exploitable for purposes of manipulation and control and, as a manipulability theory claims, it is just these relationships that are causal.