Emphasis on the characteristics of social processes implies a systemic analysis of social causation, in contrast to an individual or intentional analysis of why things happen as they do. At the extreme of the intentional approach is the animistic fallacy which explains the phenomena of society or nature as the fruition of a deliberate plan by leaders, God, conspiracies, or other intentional agents. In the animistic approach, the rationality and morality of the agents involved is crucial to the outcome. But in the systemic approach, the outcome does
The systemic approach is a methodological rather than a philosophic or political position. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx were systemic social analysts. In Smith’s classic,
The divergence between individual intention and systemic result affects both causal and moral arguments. The political right and left share a moral version of the animistic fallacy which attributes such systemic results as statistical “income distribution” to personal morality — wealth implying merit (the right) or guilt (the left). Morality is intentional and therefore individual, while purely systemic results are neither just nor unjust, though some results may be preferred to others. War, slavery, or genocide can be morally condemned as deliberately chosen policies, but the repeated ravages of bubonic plague were simply tragic consequences of sociobiological systems in a given state of knowledge. Systemic results can be improved, as by the expansion of technological boundaries, but such social improvement is morally neutral. The desire to judge systemic results morally can be seen in the medieval practice of attributing plagues to sins which had aroused the anger of God, or the modern practice of attributing unhappy systemic results in general to the moral failings of a personified “society.”
The treacherous academic analogy of “solving” social “problems” often goes counter to the concept of optimizing subject to inherent constraints. Inherent constraints imply limitations not only to what can be judged morally but also limitations on what can be achieved rationally. There may not be any “solutions” analogous to academic exercises with pre-arranged happy endings and no loose ends left dangling. This has not only intellectual but social implications. Whatever systemic results are possible in any particular economic or social system must leave unsatisfied desires, and simultaneous political and economic equilibrium requires that the political system