[Interpretationandmethods] Explanation and Ethical Evaluation

[Patrick Thaddeus Jackson]

I have no objections to Bill's claim about social scientists operating  
with implicit models of things like human social action; indeed,  
making such models explicit is part of what Weberian ideal- 
typification is all about in the first place. So we're on the same  
page there. The difference, I think, comes in precisely what is of  
interest in applying those explicit models to particular cases. Both  
Bill and I seem to disagree with the rational-choice notion of what  
one does with presumptions of rationality, which is to look for the  
hidden rationality in any bit of human behavior; rational-choice  
theory is often about demonstrating that -- and in what precise way --  
some behavior is rational, particular some behavior that looks  
irrational at first glance (like gift-giving, or dueling, or becoming  
a suicide bomber). So we agree that what is interesting about  
particular cases are their deviations from the ideal-type, not their  
correspondence with it. But then we diverge. Bill claims:

> Ancient Greek democracy was based on a slave economy.  If slavery  
> shows a lack of respect for human dignity, then those Greeks acted  
> in a less than fully rational manner.  But their behavior was not so  
> irrational as to manifest pathological causes.
> This judgment of the Ancient Greeks gauges the degree of rationality  
> in their behavior.  Thus, the existence of Greek democracy can be  
> explained, in part, by their insensitivity to the dignity and  
> intrinsic worth of those people they forced into slavery.  In this,  
> they failed to fulfill their full potential for human rationality.   
> A society of fully rational folks would not reduce their fellows to  
> chattels.
>
> This is a judgment.  But it is not the sort of judgment that a  
> priest makes when he condemns lovers for having sex out of wedlock.   
> Nor is it like the judgment of an abolitionist when he condemns all  
> slavery as an abomination.  It is far more like the judgment a  
> doctor makes about the state of a patient’s health after a thorough  
> examination.  All judgments of this sort are normative, or norm- 
> based, but not all judgments are moral/ethical judgments.  A  
> judgment of the degree of rationality in human behavior is like the  
> judgment of an Olympic diver’s performance; it is an appraisal of an  
> achievement.
>
> In short, one reality of human behavior is that it manifests varying  
> grades of rationality.  Therefore, an explanation of human behavior  
> cannot be complete without accounting for its gradient of  
> rationality.  Indeed, to ignore this range of rationality is itself  
> a less than rational act.  For social scientists to ignore it, as if  
> all rationality was equal, is professionally irresponsible.


If I read this right, Bill is claiming that the moral status of an  
institution like slavery is, or can be, a causal explanation for that  
institution. The logic runs: slavery is an irrational social  
institution ("A society of fully rational folks would not reduce their  
fellows to chattels"); the Greeks had slavery; hence the Greeks were  
not fully rational, and this lack of full rationality explains why the  
Greeks had slavery. Obviously this is not the way that Bill expressed  
the claim, because if he had expressed it this way then the logical  
flaw would become strikingly apparent: this is a circular argument.  
The claim uses the moral status of slavery to argue for the  
irrationality of the individuals and the society that upheld it (more  
on that in a moment), and then proposes to deduce why that society has  
slavery from the irrationality of the individuals and the society that  
upholds it. We know that the Greeks are irrational because they had  
slavery, and they had slavery because they were irrational. [Aristotle  
keeps coming up in this discussion; that's appropriate in many ways,  
because this kind of argument is vintage Aristotle. Except that  
Aristotle used it to argue *for* slavery: slavers are inferior to free  
men, which is what justifies enslaving them, and the primary evidence  
for the inferiority of slaves is that they are enslaved to free men.  
Slaves are slave-ish, which justifies their enslavement. Replace  
"slave" with "irrational societies" and see what you get.]

So as a causal explanation of a social institution, the moral status  
of that institution simply doesn't measure up. There is one way to  
make that argument work, though, and that is to build moral status  
into the structure of the universe. If the universe tends towards the  
Good, say, the existence of a Not-so-Good social institution might be  
explained in terms of the moral failings of the people responsible:  
they're standing in the way of universal moral progress, and the fact  
that they are doing so is producing all sorts of nasty effects, like  
slavery. Of course, to do this, you'd have to be either Kant or Hegel,  
and if you're Hegel then you have to deal with the rather striking  
problem that for Hegel slavery *implies* recognition of the humanity  
of the Other -- making it not so irrational after all. (If you're  
Kant, well, you have a bunch of other problems, like the fact that  
standards of rationality have altered over time.) Absent this rather  
drastic step, I can't see any way to make the moral status of an  
institution of an action count as an explanation of that institution  
or action.

Of course, this is a very different thing from saying that the social  
norms in force at a given point in time explain the existence of an  
institution or an action. That's a claim I'm perfectly happy with,  
because it brackets the ultimate normative status of the thing  
explained in favor of a focus on the socially operative principles at  
a given point in time (and, perhaps, how they changed; c.f. Neta  
Crawford's argument about the abolition of colonialism because of, and  
through, global normative change.) What does the explaining in the  
"social norms" argument is not the moral status of the institution,  
but the judgment of contemporaries about the moral status of the  
institution. Subtle difference, but important, I would say.

As for Bill's comparison of the judgment of slavery with the judgment  
of a diver's performance: sure, I'd buy that, if the rules for  
appraising human society were anywhere near as clear as the rules for  
appraising a diver's performance! Yes, judges in Olympic sporting  
events have a measure of discretion; that's part of why there are more  
than one of them, and why we get complicated aggregation formulas (or  
not-so-complicated formulas, like "toss out the East German judge's  
score," which used to be the operative rule in many international  
sporting competitions :-) and the like. But the range of discretion is  
considerably smaller than the range of discretion which we have in  
appraising a whole society. And those standards change over time --  
and change considerably more than do the rules of diving or baseball  
or almost any other major sport. Also, note: judging that a diver did  
thus-and-so and did not deviate from the ideal is *not* an explanation  
of that diver's performance. It is an evaluation of that performance.  
Interesting, important, critical to the sport -- but not an explanation!

PTJ
===
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
Director, General Education Program, American University
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of International Relations and Development
http://profptj.blogspot.com | http://www.kittenboo.com
calendar: http://ical.mac.com/onyxdr/Patrick

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