 Turning back to the debate about average effects in the probabilistic framework, this fact vindicates Dupré’s (1984) liberal attitude toward average effects against critics such as Eells and Sober (1983: 54) who dismiss it as a “sorry excuse for a causal concept” (though see Hitchcock 2003: 13–15, and Hausman 2010: 56, for further nuances). Of course, a positive average effect is compatible with the cause lowering the probability of the effect significantly in many subpopulations. This reflects the fact that the partitioning variable(s) could interact with the cause of interest. But such possible interactions do not make the effect any less genuine as an average effect for the whole population.