Causal judgments are well-known to be sensitive to violationsof both prescriptive moral and descriptive statistical norms.There is ongoing discussion as to whether both effects arebest explained through changes in the relevance of counter-factual possibilities, or if moral norm violations should be in-dependently explained through a potential polysemy whereby‘cause’ may simply mean ‘is morally responsible for’. Insupport of the latter view, recent work has pointed out thatmoral norm violations affect judgments of agents, but not inan-imate objects, and that these effects are moderated by agents’knowledge states. We advance this debate by demonstratingthat judgments of counterfactual relevance exhibit preciselythe same patterns, and that judgments of inanimate objects areactually highly sensitive to whether the object violated a pre-scriptive norm by malfunctioning. The latter finding is difficultto account for through polysemy, but is predicted by changes inthe relevance of counterfactual alternatives. Finally, we showthat direct (non-moral) interventions on the the relevance ofcounterfactual alternatives affect causal judgments in preciselythe same way as functional and moral norm violations.