 Interventions like these have been used by many to provide a semantics for what will here be called causal counterfactual conditionals. As the term is used here, what makes a counterfactual causal is that it holds fixed factors which are causally independent of its antecedent. It doesn’t say anything about what would have to have been different in order for the antecedent to obtain. That is: it says nothing about the necessary causal precursors of the antecedent. It holds fixed all factors which are not causally downstream of the antecedent, and only allows to swing free factors which are causally downstream of the antecedent. Within a system of structural equations, this is accomplished by modeling an intervention to bring about the truth of the antecedent. (For more on this “interventionist” treatment of counterfactuals, see Galles &amp; Pearl 1998; Briggs 2012; Huber 2013, and the entry on  counterfactuals.)