Counterfactual genealogy, speculative accuracy, & predicative drift

ABSTRACT

Explicitly fictional armchair reconstructions of the past are sometimes taken to be informative about philosophical issues. What appeal a counterfactual genealogy has depends on its speculative accuracy, that is, its accuracy in identifying relevant causal, functional, or explanatory particulars. However, even when speculatively accurate, counterfactual genealogies rarely secure more than proofs of possibility. For more ambitious deployments of genealogy – for example, efforts to show what properties the target concept in fact predicates – genealogies are hamstrung by the possibility of predicative drift, or changes over time in what the concept predicates. Still, even when counterfactual genealogies fail to tell us about our current practices or concepts, they may identify appealing successors. Pettit's (2018) innovative defense of moral realism and his employment of a counterfactual genealogy provides an illuminating instance of the promise and challenges facing accounts employing counterfactual genealogies.

KEYWORDS:

• Genealogy
• predicative drift
• moral realism
• ethics
• conceptual engineering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pettit’s position on this matter changes over the course of The Birth of Ethics. In a reply to remarks by Tomasello, after the main text, Pettit (2018) concedes that humans are likely more cooperative than his Erewhonians (350–351). He then reiterates the putative methodological virtue of a “worst case” methodology that posits a more self-interested psychology (that thought is, of course, what the present discussion contests). On the final page of the book, he pivots to a conciliatory conclusion that holds that he might be able to retain a good deal of his machinery without relying on the self-interested rationality of Erewhonians (358). While I welcome this final twist, my concern remains the same. Starting conditions matter, and until a more altruistic genealogy is told, it is not obvious that what is a “nearly inescapable” conceptual trajectory for self-interested agents is the same thing as it would be for agents who are, from the start, interdependent and cooperative. That’s a claim that would need to be earned. If I am reading him correctly, Pettit appears to acknowledge this at the very end of The Birth of Ethics (358).

2 Pettit’s (2018, 50) discussion of the genealogy of money cites Graeber (2011), but curiously he says nothing about Graeber’s argument that the standard genealogy is both erroneous and pernicious in its effects.

3 Roughly a century after Smith’s genealogy, Kant proposed a different genealogy in his The Metaphysics of Morals that emphasized the role of institutional and tax-based origins of money ([1897] 1996, §6:288, pp. 434–435). In the early 20th century, British economist Alfred Mitchell-Inness (1913) explicitly argued for a credit/debt view of the origin of money. Neither sufficed to overturn the barter story’s grip on the imagination of economists. Tellingly, economist John Maynard Keynes’ adoption of Mitchell-Inness’s credit/debt view was itself a product of his detailed study of the Babylonians. When it comes to human practices, anthropology often laughs last. For discussion of these historical antecedents and a brief history of money see Hockett and James (2020, 21; 87–104).

4 In later work, Pettit (2020) has indicated some sympathy with a version of this approach, although an explicit openness to the revisionary element is not obviously present in The Birth of Ethics. If we were to read the Birth of Ethics in that way, different questions might loom large, including those standardly raised in response to broadly revisionist accounts, concerning for example, the nature and scope of the revision, whether the proposal has enough in the way of theoretical payoffs to justify its conflicts with folk convictions, the basis on which the revisions are undertaken, whether the proposed revision is not what was meant all along, and so on.

5 Thanks to Tristram McPherson, David Plunkett, Dan Speak, Clinton Tolley for helpful discussions and detailed feedback on a prior draft of this paper.