Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics Virtues and Economics

Virtues and Economics Peter Róna László Zsolnai Editors Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics Virtues and Economics Volume 5 Series Editors Peter Róna, University of Oxford, St. Giles, Oxford, UK László Zsolnai, Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary Editorial Advisory Board Helen Alford, Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (“Angelicum”), Rome, Italy Luk Bouckaert, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium Luigino Bruni, LUMSA University, Rome and Sophia University Institute, Loppiano Georges Enderle, University of Notre Dame, USA Carlos Hoevel, Catholic University of Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina John Loughlin, Cardiff University, Emeritus Professor, Wales, UK David W. Miller, Princeton University, USA Sanjoy Mukherjee, Rajiv Gandhi Indian Institute of Management, Shillong, India Mike Thompson, GoodBrand, London, CEIBS Shanghai, and University of Victoria, Vancouver, Canada Johan Verstraeten, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium Stefano Zamagni, University of Bologna, and Johns Hopkins University – SAIS Europe and Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Italy The series is dedicated to virtue ethics and economics. Its purpose is to relocate economic theory to a domain where the connection between the virtues and economic decisions, as that connection is actually experienced in everyday life, is an organic component of theory rather than some sort of an optionally added ingredient. The goal is to help develop a virtue-based economic theory which connects virtues with the contents of economic activities of individuals, unincorporated and incorporated economic agents. The primary context is Catholic Social Teaching but other faith traditions (especially Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism) will also be explored for their construction of virtues in economic action. Special attention will be made to regulatory and policy issues in promoting economic justice. The series connects virtue ethics with the core of economic theory and practice. It examines the basic and irreducible intentionality of human activities concerned with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. It considers the incommensurability of values as the central problem of economic decision making and examines whether that problem can be overcome by any means other than practical reason. This series will cover high quality edited volumes and monographs. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15627 Peter Róna • László Zsolnai Editors Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics Editors Peter Róna László Zsolnai Blackfriars Hall Business Ethics Center University of Oxford Corvinus University of Budapest Oxford, UK Budapest, Hungary ISSN 2520-1794 ISSN 2520-1808 (electronic) Virtues and Economics ISBN 978-3-030-26113-9 ISBN 978-3-030-26114-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26114-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland The editors dedicate this volume to the memory of Prof. Paul Clough who tragically died a few days after submitting the final draft his manuscript for this volume. Preface and Acknowledgement The papers contained in this volume were delivered at Blackfriars Hall on 6 and 7 July 2018 in a symposium organized under the auspices of the Las Casas Institute. This was the fourth of a series of annual symposia held at Blackfriars with Economics as a Moral Science as the general title of the series, organized to explore the philo- sophical foundations of mainstream economics. The papers of the previous symposia and from workshops organized with the European SPES Institute in Cambridge, Oxford and Leuven have been edited by Peter Rona and Laszlo Zsolnai and published by Springer in two previous volumes, the first one, titled Economics as a Moral Science, published in 2017, while the second, titled Economic Objects and the Objects of Economics, appeared in 2018. The symposia at Blackfriars Hall grew out of a series of public lectures delivered in 2012–2014 by Peter Rona. Blackfriars Hall, the Las Casas Institute and the editors of this volume would like to express their gratitude to the Mallinckrodt Foundation for the generous financial support of the symposia. Oxford, UK Peter Rona vii Introduction It is quite difficult to make sense of an event without having a notion as to why and how it happened. Indeed, we often have an anxious sense of doubt and uncertainty about something that we know has happened if we have no or only an inadequate idea of the circumstances bringing it about. As Elizabeth Anscombe recollected in the first two sentences of her introduction to Volume II of her collected papers,1 ‘My first strenuous interest in philosophy was in the topic of causality. I didn’t know that what I was interested in belonged to philosophy’. Causality and – as some of the papers in this volume argue – agency are with us even when we are not aware of it, so much so that the questions of the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ not only affect what we know but also are quite fundamental to judgements; no system of morality, no ethical norm can do without them, and even aesthetics cannot lack some conception of the agent. Causation and agency, therefore, affect and permeate all of philosophy rang- ing from metaphysics through epistemology and ethics all the way to aesthetics. Causal and agency questions are fundamental to all branches of the social sciences as well, and the failure to thoroughly explore them, to specify their role in the theory or model being defended, lies behind many of the disappointments the social sciences, particularly economics, have suffered. The unfulfilled aspiration of the latter to keep pace with the successes of the natural sciences has been regularly noted, at least since the birth of rationalist thought. Kant, for example, in a footnote to the introductory chapter to his Critique of Pure Reason2 objects to the complaints about the ‘shallowness of the present age, and the decay of profound science’ but acknowledges that there is a problem with the social sciences: …I do not think that those which rest upon solid foundation, such as Mathematics, Physical Science, etc. in the least deserve this reproach, but that they rather retain their ancient fame, and in the latter case, indeed, far surpass it. The same would be the case with the other kinds of cognition, if their principles were but firmly established. 1 Anscombe, G. E. M. (1981) Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. 2 Kant, I. (1781) Preface to the First Edition, included in the Dover edition, Kant, I. (2003) Critique of Pure Reason translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn and published by the Colonial Press in 1900. p. ix. ix x Introduction The distinction between mathematics and the physical sciences (sometimes lumped together under the ‘exact sciences’ label) and ‘the other kinds of cognition’ on the other runs deep and features throughout much of the history of philosophy, and most thinkers analysed the problem, like Kant, in the context of cognition. The implication of the last clause of the quote above – namely, that the principles of these other types of cognition could be placed on just as firm a footing as mathematics and physical science – is a striking feature of the Enlightenment. It has stayed with us ever since and has conditioned the development of the social sciences, obscuring the great Augustinian tradition which saw the will as a distinct part of cognition, a faculty of the mind with its own properties and propensities. In a previous volume in this series,3 we defended the view that the question is not a matter of cognition but a matter of ontology. Economic events and processes are onto- logically different from the objects studied by the natural sciences because they are the product of human will: their better understanding is not obtained by the increas- ingly rigorous application of mathematical techniques but, rather, by a deeper understanding of their ontology. The modern commitment to the unicity of reality has necessarily conflated causation and agency and has given the social sciences a determinist colouration that is at odds with both experience and traditional notions of free will.

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