Is determinism more favorable than indeterminism for the causal Markov condition?

The present text comments on a paper by Daniel Steel, in which the author claims to extent from the deterministic to the general case the result according to which the causal Markov condition is satis ed by systems with jointly independent exogenous variables. I show that Steel's claim cannot be accepted unless one is prepared to abandon standard causal modeling terminology. Correlatively, I argue that the most fruitful aspect of Steel's paper consists in a realist conception of error terms and I show how this conception sheds new light on the relationship between determinism and the causal Markov condition.