Neurath's Boat

The politics of objectivity IV

The last topic I want to look at is value freedom.  There is a long tradition in the social sciences, as in science generally, of excluding value judgments from our investigations.  In Miller's example, it would be impermissible to explain the fall of the Stuarts by appealing to Stuart injustice (though widespread belief that the Stuarts were unjust could figure in an explanation of the fall of the Stuarts).  Moral features are not to be used in explanations.  Miller identifies Max Weber as the originator of this view in the social sciences; this is surely oversimplified, as the view is surely implicit in earlier theorists than Weber (Adam Smith, anyone?) and adopted by people not much directly influenced by Weber, but Weber is of course pretty huge in the history of the social sciences, and did emphasize this point.

This is not to say that evaluations should play no role in investigations.  Obviously, values determine what scientists will choose to investigate, and it would be absurd to try to do science without allowing values to play that role.  Investigating the prevalence and spread of some terrible disease, or the responses to stress of some material commonly used in constructing human artifacts, not only does but should get vastly more attention than ever more precise measurements of exactly how many grains of sand there are in a particular cubic meter of a Saharan sand dune (to borrow an example from Ernest Sosa).  What other than human values makes the former more worthy than the latter?

However, it is very important, according to the tradition, not to allow values to lead one to cook the books, as it were.  If a scientist feels it would be good to get a particular result, for some reason, and the data doesn't seem to point that way, fudging is generally considered unacceptable.  Richard Miller suggests that this is too closed-minded.  His example involves anthropological investigations of non-white cultures around a century ago.

According to Miller, some anthropologists of the time were highly motivated by opposition to then nearly universal and unquestioned racism, and actively searched for evidence of cultural sophistication in non-white cultures in order to provide a counter to racist inclinations.  It's important to be very careful about what this shows; if they set themselves the task of looking for sophisticated cultural patterns, that's perfectly compatible with Weberian standards.  They only violated the rules if they did or would have fudged the results if their data had turned out to be negative.  Did they do this, and should they have?

On the empirical question of whether they did, I have no clue.  On whether they should have, I say absolutely not.  It undermines their credibility.  Creating an atmosphere in which fudging data is tolerated for any reason undermines science generally.  Further, tolerance for any kind of cheating is going to benefit the entrenched interests more; there are more people willing to cheat for them.  A zero-tolerance policy on cheating immunizes those opposed to the entrenched power structure from being criticized for cheating (sure, their critics will find other ways, or just lie, but while it's idealistic to suppose the truth always wins out, it is an advantage to have it on your side), and also avoids charges of hypocrisy when the radical critic attacks research favoring the status quo for failing to live up to standards of objectivity.

In Miller's own example, simply setting the question, simply deciding to investigate the cultural richness of non-white cultures, already helps the cause of radical politics.  To bring this back to my positivist revival theme, the positivists favored meticulous value-freedom in the social sciences and very careful attention to logic and methodological issues at a time when the social sciences were dominated by Marxists.  Those of Marxist inclination would, of course, be inclined to investigate how the existing capitalist ruling classes maintained power, what conditions were actually like for the poor, what obstacles existed to the poor improving their circumstances, and so forth.  Objectively investigating questions like that would naturally produce results which would be of benefit to those engaged in radical politics.  Again, injecting bias into the investigation beyond this choice of subjects would undermine the benefits of doing carefully chosen objective investigations.  So it seems to me that the positivists were probably taking the optimal stance from the point of view of advancing their radical political agendas in emphasizing objective science and careful methodology.

Of course, just as encouraging particular lines of research can advance political agendas, so can discouraging lines of research.  Furthermore, encouraging one line of research can ipso facto end up discouraging other lines, since the resources available for research are limited.  So, for example, the radical critique Miller makes of contemporary economics, that its obsession with things like GDP growth is politically problematic, seems to me to be likely well founded.  Injecting bias into the investigation of economic problems is not the solution, though; the solution is to find ways to encourage unbiased investigation of more relevant phenomena.

The politics of objectivity III

Richard Miller also condemns a form of reductionism he calls methodological individualism.  This is the doctrine that all group behavior can be reduced to the behavior of individuals.  In one sense, I think individualist reductionism has to be right; surely groups can only do things via individuals doing things.  This does not, however, mean that there is no value in studying groups as such, and Miller thinks methodological individualism involves a stronger form of reductionism which not only says group talk can be reduced, but largely advocated abolishing group talk.

One of Miller's examples of what's wrong with methodological individualism involves attitudes toward slavery in the American South.  He claims that around 1820, there was a dramatic change in such attitudes.  Prior to that point, there was a widespread feeling that slavery was a problematic institution, perhaps necessary for now but something that would eventually die out.  From 1820 on, the southerners became much more inclined to think that slavery was actually a good thing, because it exerted a civilizing influence on the blacks.

Miller argues that this shift occurred because of technological changes; the cotton gin made a form of slavery-based agriculture extremely profitable.  However, of course none of the southern slave owners would have admitted that this was their motive, and Miller suggests that there is no reason to think they were being disingenuous in giving other motives.  Miller concludes that understanding what happened requires looking at the interests of the slave-owning class, rather than focusing on the motives of individual actors.

I find this particular argument stunningly weak, all the more annoying for the fact that I happen to agree with the conclusion.  Economists, surely the worst offenders when it comes to methodological individualism, do not in any way require that the self-interested motives of the agents they hypothesize be consciously pursued.  They don't care about psychology.  And analysis in terms of the self-interest of agents, with self-interest largely inferred on the basis of what people actually pursue, has a good record of success in providing economic explanations.  It is not at all obvious that this pattern of individualist explanation is not adequate to the case Miller describes.  You're welcome to read his actual work, of course, but I don't recall him including any additional detail in the case which would block this response.

Nonetheless, there are clearly anti-individualist theories (not necessarily non-reductivist, but theories that insist on examining groups as groups).  No doubt they are the kinds of theories Miller is interested in.  It is overwhelmingly plausible that the upper classes have class consciousness, and always have had.  Plato thought so.  Marx (obviously) thought so.  Nietzsche thought so.  Adam Smith even thought so.  Pretty much every historian I'm aware of thought so.  The explicit writings of the upper classes themselves support the hypothesis that some kind of group loyalty is an important motive in the behavior of members of the upper classes.  Really anybody who isn't a political libertarian seems to have noticed this.

It is also arguable that the lower classes have often had class consciousness, and of course Marxists of Miller's type would tend to argue that part of the reason modern capitalist institutions get away with so much inequality is because they do a good job of undermining the class consciousness of the lower classes, fragmenting them into mutually hostile groups.

It is quite plausible that any group which is successful and powerful must have mechanisms for encouraging group loyalty, various rewards for supporting the club and punishments for betrayals of the group.  While investigating exactly what those mechanisms are is, of course, a fascinating project in itself, for an old, well-entrenched group, they're likely to be quite diverse and complicated.  Thus, for some purposes it may be more useful to just study the group, noting that it engages in purposeful behavior and that the interests of the group sometimes explain the behavior of individuals more perspicuously than trying to tease out all the little incentives that cause a particular individual to act in the group's interest in a particular case.

This pattern of explanation again particularly makes sense for powerful groups that are effective at perpetuating themselves, and so it seems natural that this form of explanation should work better for ruling classes than for lower classes (which seems to be the pattern in historical explanations).  Still, whether this sort of group-based approach to explanation is overall desirable is clearly an empirical question.  I'm inclined to think this form of explanation probably is desirable, but Miller's example, and his discussion of it, are woefully inadequate to establishing that fact.  Much more wide-reaching investigation, a much greater variety of examples, and ideally examination of a variety of disciplines would be needed to establish that claim.

Which, incidentally, brings up a quick bleg.  Anybody know of any good recent work that's been done in this area?  I'm sure somebody must have a better discussion of these issues than Miller.

Decline of Economist

I have been irritated with the Economist for some time now, for their kid gloves treatment of Bush (their criticisms of Bush are always so half-hearted), and their support of the Iraq war.  The Foxification of this once great newspaper continues apace.  The cover story in the most recent Economist, which I have now gotten around to reading, talks about Lula (president of Brazil) and Hugo Chavez, whom I'm sure everybody knows.

Lula is coming up for re-election.  He looks likely to win, and the Economist suggests in its story that his re-election would be undeserved.  No doubt this is part of the reason Lula is paired with Chavez in the story; Chavez is, of course, an authoritarian loon who has not particularly succeeded in doing any good for any of his people despite the massive oil revenues of recent years.  Since Chavez is leftist in his rhetoric, and Lula is certainly a leftist, the Economist apparently wishes to portray them as a pair of leftist loons.

So, what's Lula's record as president of Brazil?  Under his leadership, according to the Economist's own report, Brazil has experienced moderate economic growth, kept debt under control, kept inflation under control, increased tax revenues, and implemented a wide variety of anti-poverty programs the effect of which has been to increase the incomes of the poorest Brazilians dramatically, thus significantly lowering inequality in Brazil.

What, that doesn't sound like a horrible record to you?  You think maybe the world needs more leftist loons if that's an example of what they do?  Well, that's what I would have thought as well.  But apparently this gets Lula only a few points balanced against the huge strikes against him.

What are his horrible flaws?  Well, apparently the increased tax revenues are actually bad.  Even though the economy has been growing despite them.  Taxes are inherently evil, don't you know.  Also, Lula, like every president Brazil has ever had, has failed to completely clear away the vast tangle of corruption which Brazil has accumulated over the centuries.  One might think that the only way tax revenues could be going up dramatically would be if corruption is being at least slightly reduced, so that tax cheating has become harder, but those are dots the Economist prefers not to connect.

There have been corruption scandals in his government, admittedly, but none of them appear to implicate Lula personally, and given the general success of Lula's record, one can't help but wonder if what's changed is that corruption is being exposed more often rather than that it has become more severe.  Still, the corruption is a serious problem, and if the Economist had said that despite his generally good record, Lula has not done enough to reign in corruption, I would not have complained about their article.  Instead, they said that a second term was undeserved.

Sadly, the only possible explanation for this I can divine is that the Economist thinks the most important thing for a government to accomplish is to make the rich richer.  This Lula has singularly failed to do; moderate economic growth plus dramatic poverty reduction of course means hardly any increase in wealth for the rich.  They did not used to be so nakedly aristocratic in their biases.  Though I do not have a good alternative source of solid international news, I think I may be letting my subscription lapse.

A good series

There have been a number of good posts recently on Philosophy, et cetera about utlitiarianism, deontology, and libertarians.  The latest is here.  The propertarians are, as people might have noted from earlier posts, something of a pet peeve of mine.  For those who haven't followed enough anti-libertarian blogs, the propertarians are the people who claim that their position is all about protecting people's fundamental rights, who write as if the only right worth mentioning is the right to property.  In other words, most libertarians.