 While some authors suggest that time-asymmetric causal relations might be strictly incompatible with time-reversal invariant dynamical laws, it is more promising to try and argue that adding time-asymmetric causal relations to physics cannot be justified within physics. It is this latter claim that an appeal to initial conditions and their role in underwriting common cause reasoning is meant to challenge. From the perspective of the functional project, the central role of common-cause reasoning both in commonsense and in physics contexts provides perhaps the strongest argument for the claim that the very same—or at least very closely related—causal concepts are operative in common sense causal judgements and in causal reasoning in physics.