On Normative Commitments

Frank Pasquale has a typically thoughtful post up over at CoOp, discussing what he terms "economic imperalism."  He begins:

Economics is becoming the "it" social science discipline for generalist readers seeking to understand themselves and society. Just as the modish may have turned to Freudian psychology or Parsonian sociology or sociobiology in the 20th century, they now lap up economics popularizers. This latest incarnation of social science svengalis has one great advantage over its predecessors: extraordinary facility with data and its mathematical manipulation. But as Alan Wolfe notes in his insightful review of recent books by Bruno Frey and Dan Ariely, we do well to examine closely the nature of that data, the philosophical commitments of its analysts, and the limits of its extrapolability.

I've voiced similar sentiments here on MH Blog, not because I believe that economics and data-driven research is unimportant or unnecessary, particularly when thinking about health policy.  Quite the contrary, such work is crucial.  However, if there is anything that the humanities teaches, it is that human endeavors are unavoidably normative in nature.  We are historicized, interpretive creatures, and we come to any practice -- including medicine, science, and economics -- with myriad normative commitments and philosophical beliefs that undeniably and in important ways color how we construct our methods and produce our knowledge.

Thus, the idea of "objective" evidence from data-driven, quantitative research, if such evidence is meant to imply the "view-from-nowhere," is, to borrow my favorite Wittgensteinian metaphor, akin to the ideas of doors painted onto walls.  Economics is no more or less value-based than any other human endeavor, IMO.  The fact that, in my experience, this contention is likely to be resisted so fiercely says much about our epistemic commitments. 

Comments

[Frank]

Thanks for the shout out. I hope to read the big Galison/Daston book on objectivity sometime next year.

I like your views on the lessons of the humanities, and you may like LArry Mitchell's piece in the U. Toronto Law Rev. correcting the "objectivist" bias of economically oriented scholars of norms by pointing to the work of Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments.

[Daniel S. Goldberg]

Hey Frank,

I've read Daston and Galison's tome, and it is quite good in historicizing objectivity, but also has some faults (e.g., tending towards a periodistic approach in insisting that because the modern conception of objectivity was born in the late 19th century, earlier events are of considerably less importance). A central part of my dissertation is locating the historical rise of objectivity in clinical method in context of visible lesions (you can see the potential relevance for neuroethics, I'm sure).

Thanks for the cite to Larry Mitchell. I continue to think Smith would be horrified if he saw the excesses to which his theories have been subjected. Smith was a consummate moralist; the significance of virtue and value in general in his conception was paramount. Excising such concerns from the domain of positive economics would have been anathema to him.