Rawls and decision theory

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice was a strikingly original contribution to political philosophy upon its appearance in 1971.  Against the prevailing preference for "meta-ethics" in the field of philosophical ethics, Rawls made an effort to arrive at substantive, non-tautological principles that could be justified as a sort of "moral constitution" for a just society.  The theory involves two fundamental principles of justice: the liberty principle, guaranteeing maximal equal liberties for all citizens, and the difference principle, requiring that social and economic inequalities should be the least possible, subject to the constraint of maximizing the position of the least-well-off.  (The principle also requires equality...

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,justice,morality,rational choice theory,rationality,Rawls

Business interests and democracy

The central ideal of democracy is the notion that citizens can express their political and policy preferences through political institutions, and that the policies selected will reflect those preferences. We also expect that elected officials will act ethically in support of the best interests of the public. This is their public trust.The anti-democratic possibility is that popular debates and expressions of preference are only a sham, and that secretive, powerful actors are able to secure their will in most circumstances. And in contemporary circumstances, that sounds a lot like corporations and business lobbying organizations. (Here is an earlier post on a report about corrupt behavior at the Department of the Interior.)The January Supreme...

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Posted in: CAT_power,corruption,democracy,power

Equality and violence in Alabama, 1960s

image: Ben Shahn photo of Arkansas sharecropperCreating civil and political rights for African Americans in the 1960s required courage and persistence by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.  The system of Jim Crow assured subordination in fundamental rights and needs for millions of rural southern black people -- the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to use public amenities, and the right to a decent education.  This system was held in place by the threat and reality of violence -- beatings, lynchings, shootings, and pervasive threats against individuals and families.  This kind of violent environment made it particularly difficult to see the road from subordination to equality.  The people of Lowndes...

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,race,social movements

What do we want from sociology?

Let's say we've absorbed the anti-positivism argued many times here -- sociology should not be modeled on the natural sciences, we shouldn't expect social phenomena to have the homogeneity and consistency characteristic of natural phenomena, and we shouldn't expect to find social laws.  What remains for the intellectual task of post-positivist sociology?  What do we want from sociology?Here are a handful of topics that are both important and feasible.description and theory of social movements / collective action / popular politicscomparative study of large historical social-political formations such as fascism, colonialism, fiscal systemsdescriptive analysis of social inequalities (race, gender, class, ethnicity) and their mechanismsdescriptive and theoretical accounts of major social...

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,causal mechanism,theory

Scientific realism for the social sciences

What is involved in taking a realist approach to social science knowledge? Most generally, realism involves the view that at least some of the assertions of a field of knowledge make true statements about the properties of unobservable things, processes, and states in the domain of study.  Several important philosophers of science have taken up this issue in the past three decades, including Rom Harre (Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity) and Roy Bhaskar (A Realist Theory of Science).  Peter Manicas's recent book, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science: Explanation and Understanding, is a useful step forward within this tradition. Here is how he formulates the perspective of scientific realism:The real goal of science...

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,causal mechanism,localism,mechanism,philosophy of science

Symbolic logic and ontology

image: theorem from Russell and Whitehead, Principia MathematicaIn what ways do the abstract features of symbolic logic reflect characteristics of thought?The syntax of symbolic logic is illustrative.  First order predicate theory provides syntactic categories for individuals (a, b, c; x, y, z), properties (Fx, Gx), relations (xRy), n-place relations (R(x1, ..., xn)), logical connectives (∧, ∨, ~, ⊃), and quantifiers (∀x, ∃x).  We also need to introduce the notation of mathematical functions (x = f(w,y,z)) -- though this represents a significant expansion of the formal power of symbolic logic.  Individuals are objects that possess properties and fall within...

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Posted in: CAT_ontology

"Theory" in sociology

What is a sociological theory? And how does it relate to the challenge of providing explanations of social facts?In the natural sciences the answer to this question is fairly clear. A theory is a hypothesis about one or more entities or processes and a specification of their operations and interactions. A theory is articulated in terms that permit rigorous and unambiguous derivation of implications for the behavior of a body of phenomena -- perhaps through specification of a set of equations or through a set of statements with deductive consequences. A theory may specify deterministic properties of a set of entities -- thus permitting point predictions about future states of the relevant system; or it may specify probabilistic relations among...

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,concepts,epistemology,theory

Works councils and US labor relations

image: Diego Rivera, Rouge Plant mural, Detroit Institute of ArtsThe United States has one of the lowest rates of union representation of all developed countries. The 1994 level of unionized workers in the US had fallen to about 12 percent of private sector employment, and the trend is downward.  And the sole institutional form through which representation occurs in the US context is the union.  So the vast majority of American workers are left with no formal representation within the firm when it comes to wages, benefits, or work practices.This situation contrasts strikingly with the labor-management institutions in place in much of Europe and Japan. In most other countries legislation establishes the opportunity or the mandate for...

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Posted in: CAT_institutions,institutions,labor rights

Scott's social imagination

Image: Le Corbusier, Paris planWhat is most remarkable about Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is the texture and grain of the argument that Scott makes. This is a high-resolution argument that leaves little to doubt. The guiding thesis is original and striking enough -- that a mental framework of "high modernism" guided the thinking of a wide range of twentieth-century reformers, from agricultural specialists to city planners to revolutionaries; and that this framework led to predictable disasters. Ecology, social behavior, and cityscapes are complex, involuted systems that demand locally tailored knowledge, and the abstract simplifications of scientific forestry or le Corbusier's geometric...

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Posted in: CAT_disciplines,innovation

The inexact science of economics

Image: social accounting matrix, Bolivia, 1997Economics is an "inexact" science; or so Daniel Hausman argues in The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (Google Books link).  As it implies, this description conveys that economic laws have only a loose fit with observed economic behavior.  Here are the loosely related interpretations that Hausman offers for this idea, drawing on the thinking of John Stuart Mill:Inexact laws are approximate.  They are true within some margin of error.Inexact laws are probabilistic or statistical.  Instead of stating how human beings always behave, economic laws state how they usually behave.Inexact laws make counterfactual assertions about how things would be in the absence of interferences.Inexact...

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,confirmation,explanation,prediction