A Job for Philosophers: Causality, Responsibility, and Explaining Social Inequality

Abstract

People disagree about the causes of social inequality and how to most effectively intervene in them. These may seem like empirical questions for social scientists, not philosophers. However, causal explanation itself depends on broadly normative commitments. From this it follows that (moral) philosophers have an important role to play in determining those causal explanations. I examine the case of causal explanations of poverty to demonstrate these claims. In short, philosophers who work to reshape our moral expectations also work, on the back end, to restructure acceptable causal explanations—and hence solutions—for social inequality. Empirical and normative inquiry, then, are a two-way street.

Social structural explanation

“…So, why take capitalism to be the cause of poverty rather than individuals’ choices within that system, given that both are jointly necessary for poverty to occur? (Zheng, 2018, p. 340) Zheng adopts Kronfeldner’s (2014) view of causal selection to answer this question: “we select as causes the factors that we are willing and prepared to change” (Zheng, 2018, p. 330). Our normative commitments influence whether we take a causal factor as fixed (an enabling condition) or changeable (the cause).…”

Structural Injustice, Epistemic Opacity, and the Responsibilities of the Oppressed

“… For a discussion of this problem and people’s propensity to misattribute, the causes of poverty, see Robin Zheng (). See also some of the sources on which her article draws, for example, Nokwanda Maseko, Diana Viljoen, and Paul‐François Muzindutsi (), Antarjeeta Nayak, Jalandhar Pradhan, and Ramaskrishna Biswal (), Irene Y. H. Ng and Grace Koh (), Leonor Pereira Da Costa and José G. Dias ().…”