Deep Causality and Counterfactuals for Scientific Explanation and Ethically Efficacious Economics and Social Sciences: How can the social sciences help make policies for advancing the common good?

Khan, Haider (2024): Deep Causality and Counterfactuals for Scientific Explanation and Ethically Efficacious Economics and Social Sciences: How can the social sciences help make policies for advancing the common good?

Abstract

What does a causal explanation deliver in any science, but particularly in the social sciences? How are relatively deeper scientific explanations to be distinguished from superficial or shallower ones? Furthermore, what roles can counterfactual analysis play in social sciences and policy making? For a competent, morally motivated scientific policy maker, it is important to avoid inflicting harm and promote the common good. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how the idea of depth can play a role in finding the more "approximately true" explanation through causal comparisons and counterfactual conditionals that are scientifically salient in principle. In doing so, we must also be able to avoid inflicting harm and promote the common good. It is not an exhaustive treatment but rather focuses on a few aspects that may be the most critical in evaluating the explanatory strengths of a theory in the social sciences. It presents a general argument which is anti-Humean on the critical side and scientific realist on the positive and normative side. It also elucidates how explanations in political economy and other social sciences can be judged by the scientific realist criterion of causal depth by an extensive example from research in the political economy of development. In this case, an "intentional" and methodologically individualist neoclassical explanation is contrasted with a "structural" dual-dual approach as rival theories purporting to explain the same set of phenomena. Finally, avoiding harmful policies and aiding in making policies for advancing the common good are more likely if the methodological approach advocated here is adopted for responsible practice. Ultimately, following the methodology advanced here , it will be possible to drive further the tendencies towards the creation of an ethically efficacious economics(EEE) for ecologically sustainable humane policy making.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Scientific Explanations, Social and Economic Explanations, Causal Depth, Critical Scientific Realism, Political Economy, Neoclassical Economics, Structuralism, Social Science Theories, Economic Models, Ethics and Economics, Counterfactuals and Causal Efficacy, Common Good. Economic Justice, Ethically Efficacious Economics(EEE)
• Subjects: B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B4 - Economic Methodology; C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C9 - Design of Experiments; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I3 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty

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