Causal explanation and moral judgement: Undividing a division

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 717-734

  Suganami, Hidemi ^a  

^a ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Causation; Explanation; Moral judgement; Voluntary acts

Indexed keywords

EID: 79956339744     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829811402809     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. Acknowledging that it is not practicable to separate the two, Mommsen, for instance, nevertheless holds that historians must not indulge in a 'mere reiteration of a given standpoint by historiographical means' and that they have a moral responsibility to modify their original perspectives and their presuppositions if a history they are writing 'cannot incorporate all the relevant facts and eludes plausible narration'.
2. W.J. Mommsen, 'Moral Commitment and Scholarly Detachment: The Social Function of the Historian', in Historians and Social Values, ed. Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 55 and 53.
3. H. Kelsen, 'Causality and Retribution', in What Is Justice? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 314.
4. M. Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans.
5. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 7-9.
6. B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans.
7. C. Porter (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 82-5.
8. C. Porter (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 84.
9. C. Merchant, "The Violence of Impediments": Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation', Isis 99 (2008): 731-60.
10. T. Erskine, 'Introduction: Making Sense of "Responsibility" in International Relations - Key Questions and Concepts', in Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations, ed. T. Erskine (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 16, emphasis in original.
11. H.L.A. Hart and T. Honoré, Causation in the Law, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
12. For an early statement
13. Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, ed. Sir William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839), 121-2.
14. R. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 3rd edn (London: Verso, 2008), 250.
15. The positivist-postpositivist divide, underlying the two tendencies noted here, continues to be salient in IR debates.
16. S. Smith, K. Booth and M. Zalewski, eds, International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) is now a classic
17. Among many other sites, A. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
18. M. Kurki, Causation in International Relations: Reclaiming Causal Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). The tendency to separate the causal from the moral may be part of a broader 'Humean' tendency to split our knowledge claims into three types: logical/conceptual, empirical and normative. It is fairly common to hear that there cannot be a logical or conceptual connection between the cause and the effect or that a properly 'causal' statement cannot be logically/conceptually true
19. This reinforces, or is backed by, the idea that causal statements are empirical, which, in turn, connects to the thought that the causal and the normative must be distinct. On the causal-logical separation
20. H. Suganami, 'Wendt, IR, and Philosophy', in Constructivism and International Relations: Alexander Wendt and His Critics, eds S. Guzzini and A. Leander (London: Routledge, 2006)
21. P. Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans.
22. M. Moore-Rinvolucri, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). On the relationship of causal processes to time
23. J.L. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), ch. 7
24. W.H. Dray, 'Concepts of Causation in A.J.P. Taylor's Accounts of the Origins of the Second World War', History and Theory 17 (1978): 149-74
25. W.H. Dray, 'A Controversy over Causes: A.J.P. Taylor and the Origins of the Second World War', in W.H. Dray, Perspectives on History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 69-96.
26. Veyne and Dray, almost entirely neglected in the IR community, offer important insights into IR's basic meta-theoretical issues: the structure of causal explanation of events, the nature of 'theory' in social science and history, the relationship between explanation and moral judgement, and agent-structure relationships
27. A.R.C. Humphreys, 'The Questions We Ask: Obstacles to Dialogue in the Theory/History Nexus', paper presented at Millennium conference, 'International Relations in Dialogue', 16 October, 2010. A social scientist offering a causal explanation of a single case is a 'historian'. It is common to distinguish social scientists from historians by recourse to the nomothetic-idiographic dichotomy
28. C. Elman and M. Elman, eds, Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). These labels are unhelpful, however, where a single case is explained by a unique/rare combination of causal mechanisms, each generalisable under relevant conditions. Those who firmly believe that the only way to explain a particular event causally is to subsume it under a general pattern may find my discussion of explanation irrelevant to their interest and even unconvincing. I have responded to such reactions elsewhere
29. H. Suganami, On the Causes of War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
30. Narrative Explanation and International Relations: Back to Basics', Millennium 37 (2008): 327-56
31. The verb 'to explicate' has a similar history. Note also the meanings of 'auslegen' in German. The etymology is instructive in suggesting that 'explaining a causal process' involves revealing what is initially hidden from us in such a way that makes the process appear to 'explain itself'
32. The covering-law model of explanation is supposed to reveal the structure of explanation in 'science'. However, it only addresses one kind of question - 'Does this type of event happen regularly?' - leaving other questions untouched. I am sceptical of formulaic understandings of 'explanation' which tell us what to do to make our activity count as a case of 'explaining'. To say, for example, that there is a form of explanation known as a 'reason-giving account', according to which stating the actor's reason for his/her act 'explains' it, subtly misses the point
33. Such an activity counts as 'explaining' to the extent that it answers the explainee's query, 'What was his/her reason for acting in that way?'. Formulaic understandings of 'explanation' are present in D.M. Taylor, Explanation and Meaning: An Introduction to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)
34. C. Reynolds, Theory and Explanation in International Politics (London: Martin Robertson, 1973)
35. Modes of Imperialism (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981)
36. S. Smith and M. Hollis, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
37. S. Scriven, 'Truisms as the Grounds for Historical Explanation', in Theories of History, ed. P. Gardiner (London: Collier Macmillan, 1959), 449
38. To think of 'historical processes in the human social sphere' as a discrete realm is already to view the world through a historically contingent, culturally specific, politically and ethically significant filter which separates the human social realm from the natural and the divine
39. C. Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004)
40. Under the influence of positivism, however, the IR community suppressed substantive moral questions as merely 'subjective'
41. S. Smith, 'The Forty Years' Detour: The Resurgence of Normative Theory in International Relations', Millennium 21 (1992): 489-506.
42. One of the earliest post-war examples explicitly defending the significance of moral questioning in IR
43. M.D. Donelan and M.J. Grieve, International Disputes: Case Histories 1945-1970 (London: Europa, 1973), Introduction
44. Veyne, Writing History, 105
45. Veyne, Writing History, 307.
46. Heidegger, 'Technology', 3.
47. Heidegger, 'Technology', 7-8.
48. That 'from which comes the beginning of change' is how Aristotle explains the idea in The Metaphysics, trans. with an Introduction by H. Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 12
49. The original source of change' is his formulation in Physics, trans. by R. Waterfield and with an Introduction and Notes by D. Bostock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 39
50. Kurki's Causation in International Relations reminds us of the continued significance of the Aristotelian framework
51. Heidegger, 'Technology', 7
52. Thus, even for one of the most nomothetically oriented American political scientists: 'All social events may be thought of as the outcome of a concatenation of some deterministic, stochastic, and voluntaristic elements
53. J.D. Singer, 'The Historical Experiment as a Research Strategy in the Study of World Politics', in The Correlates of War. I. Research Origins and Rationale, ed. J.D. Singer (New York: Free Press, 1979), 184
54. At the other end of the spectrum, the historian E.H. Carr employs the same tripartite classification in framing his discussion of historical causation in his What Is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), ch. 4
55. S. Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1-2, emphasis added. To say that the tripartite scheme seems 'pervasive' is only to point to that apparent historical/social fact. It is not to formulate a model of explanation from some a priori standpoint, on which
56. P.A. Roth, 'Three Dogmas (More or Less) of Explanation', History and Theory 47 (2008): 57-68
57. A. Heller, A Theory of History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 173
58. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science
59. R.N. Lebow, Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)
60. Aristotle, Physics, 39
61. Similarly, Latour suggests that 'anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor', or what I am calling here an 'agent'. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71, emphasis Latour's
62. Similarly, Latour points out that an 'actor is made to act by many others', that '[b]y definition, action is dislocated', and that '[i]f an actor is said to be an actor-network, it is first of all to underline that it represents the major source of uncertainty about the origin of action.' Latour, Reassembling the Social, 16, emphases Latour's
63. Arendt observes that in Aristotle, '[a]n act in which I am under threat of violence but am not physically coerced would have counted as voluntary'.
64. H. Arendt, The Life of Mind. II. Willing (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 16.
65. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 21
66. see n. 12 above.
67. Dray, 'A Controversy over Causes', 71, italics mine
68. Dray, 'A Controversy over Causes', italics mine 82-3. This is how Dray summarises one of a number of arguments Taylor advances in his book regarding Hitler and his conduct of foreign policy
69. This is how Dray summarises one of a number of arguments Taylor advances in his book regarding Hitler and his conduct of foreign policy, 83
70. This is how Dray summarises one of a number of arguments Taylor advances in his book regarding Hitler and his conduct of foreign policy, 84-85
71. Note here a subtle though significant difference between whether or not Hitler was 'forced' to act in the sense that concerned Taylor and 'in the sense at issue in the dispute' which interested Dray
72. Note here a subtle though significant difference between whether or not Hitler was 'forced' to act in the sense that concerned Taylor and 'in the sense at issue in the dispute' which interested Dray, 84, italics mine
73. A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 7
74. Dray, 'Controversy over Causes', 85
75. J. Joll, 'Politicians and the Freedom to Choose: The Case of July 1914', in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed., A. Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 99-114
76. J. Joll, 'Politicians and the Freedom to Choose: The Case of July 1914', in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed., A. Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 111.
77. J. Joll, 'Politicians and the Freedom to Choose: The Case of July 1914', in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed., A. Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 113-14.
78. J. Joll,'Politicians and the Freedom to Choose: The Case of July 1914', in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed., A. Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 114, emphasis added
79. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 12, 45, 145-6, 166
80. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 12, 45, 249-50
81. This was Taylor's line
82. Dray, 'A Controversy over Causes', 71
83. For an insightful discussion
84. R. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 1998), 54ff
85. Suganami, On the Causes of War, 189
86. Compare J. Snyder, 'Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984', International Security 9 (1984): 108-46
87. A.J.P. Taylor, War by Time-Table: How the First World War Began (London: Macdonald, 1969)
88. Lebow, Forbidden Fruit
89. Philip Pomper, 'Historians and Individual Agency', History and Theory 35 (1996): 281-308, which incorporates Dray's analysis and offers an interesting discussion of the various rhetorical strategies historians employ to suppress 'individual agency'
90. H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)
91. This is what, on the eve of the First World War, Bethmann Hollweg saw lying over Europe and the German people
92. K. Jarausch, 'The Illusion of Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg's Calculated Risk, July 1914', Central European History 2 (1969): 64
93. Carr's 'Utopians' presented history of international politics in the 19th century as a 'comedy' in this sense and assumed it to be an unchanging feature of the realm
94. E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1939). Lebow, following Thucydides, Clausewitz and Morgenthau, however, sees tragic emplotment as teaching us better lessons in our era.
95. R.N. Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
96. White, Metahistory, 29
97. An early exploration of this theme in the field of history/IR is K.L. Nelson and S.C. Olin, Jr, Why War? Ideology, Theory and History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979)
98. Robert Jervis, ed., 'Roundtable on "Politics and Scholarship"', H-Diplo/ISSF (2010), available at: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Roundtable-1-2.pdf