Yes, those arguments against causality of those "Philosophers and others" are "just wrong on every level".
Those standard wavefuction solutions used to describe phenomena are time irreversible, but contrary to a common confusion in the literature, those solutions do not correspond to time-symmetric equations. It is trivial to show that the weavefunctions used in quantum scattering are not solution to the Schrödinger equation, but solution to the modified (time-irreversible) equation
[math]i\hbar \frac{\partial\Psi}{\partial t} = H \Psi + \eta ( \Psi - \Phi )[/math]
with Phi the unperturbed wavefunction and eta the infinitesimal that regularizes the power series expansion of the perturbed state Psi.
In fact, a generalization to mixed states of the above time-irreversible equation is used as base for a formulation of irreversible quantum statistical mechanics. I mean the Zubarev equation.
Those decays of unstable particles you allude are often described by a time-irreversible extension of the Schrödinger equation obtained by replacing the Hamiltonian as H --> H - iR. The associated quantum states of the instable particle no longer are defined in a Hilbert space and give one of the known formulations of irreversible quantum mechanics.
Entropy is not fundamental. The irreversible equations mentioned above continue to work in situations where the concept of entropy does not apply or is ill-defined. The second law "Entropy increases with time" is only an approximation. It can be demonstrated that the monotonic production of entropy is only valid in the Markovian regime. The classical second law is not a fundamental law, but only an approximated way to characterize irreversible processes.
Yes, it is very funny how some people dismiss the second law as "empirical". The most ridiculous argument against the second Law I know is found in the textbook by Robert Zwanzig. He argues that all that we know about the classical second law is derived from experiments made in a Human timescale "the ice cube always melts and never reappears", and so we cannot really trust thermodynamics about what will happen in thousands of million years, instead he claims we must trust dynamics and its time-reversibility, and that the ice cube will reappear, even if we will not see it, because dynamics says it will happen. It is ridiculous because dynamics has been also formulated over the base of experiments made on a Human time scale. He seem to believe that dynamics was formulated by God whereas thermodynamics was only formulated by scientists. LOL
Effectively, causality does not require an arrow of time. Classical Hamiltonian mechanics is time-reversible (there is no arrow of time) and however it is fully causal. And, of course, causality does not require determinism.
Whereas agreeing with most, I don't think I have to take causality as a fundamental property of the Universe.