Some phrases fall apart when you analyze them too much.

What is the root cause of, say, scurvy? Some millions of years ago, our monkey ancestors lost the ability to manufacture vitamin C in their own bodies. Since then, anyone who stops eating enough vitamin C faces scurvy.

But this is not actionable, as another commenter says. We cannot yet fix our genomes to bring internal production of vitamin C back online. So we say that root cause of scurvy is lack of vitamin C in that person's diet, which can be fixed very easily now.

If/when technologies like CRISPR mature enough that playing around with genes and their expression becomes a routine thing, we might change our genomes so that vitamin C gets produced internally again, thus shifting the perceived root cause.

Dietal lack of vitamin C is the direct cause, not some sort of root cause.

Deeper causes include education about nutrition and availability/affordability of vitamin C rich foods. The causes of problems here are deeper, sociological and cultural, and probably to some extent lack of money and other more primitive needs.

You could even then go one step further back: the root cause is that animals developed in a way that they need vitamin C. (ok, now it is getting silly)

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

(Douglas Adams)

Didn't expect that an inquiry into scurvy finds the root cause of all problems, glad it did.

Technically, there is no actual root cause, as you suspect. But what we are really looking for is something actionable – some “root” cause which we can affect in order to avoid getting the same problem in the future.

*in order to feel like we did something so we do not have to keep thinking about "will it happen again" every night when going to sleep.

Remark that this does not mean we made it happen less. Just that we soothed the part of our brain that was scared.

>we are really looking for is something actionable

Great viewpoint!

You're getting at the Münchhausen trilemma.

You are technically right, so let's just pick a pragmatic and useful definition of root cause: the preceding event or circumstance that is at right the level of abstraction and proximity where knowledge of this will be maximally helpful to people in similar situations in the future.

You're absolutely right. It's not well defined. https://uploadsproject.org/2014/10/07/the-seductive-logic-of...

Root cause doesn't have to be a single instance of recognizable failure. It can we wrapped variable X, that contains whatever non-deterministic event, process or physical instance. That's the best one can do in certain circumstances.