1
Causal Explanation and Moral Judgement: Undividing a Division1
Hidemi Suganami
Aberystwyth University
hss@aber.ac.uk
Abstract
Moral judgement is not intrinsic to causal explanation. However, developing the arguments of
Veyne, Joll and Dray, I argue that our moral judgement seeps through to our causal explanation
of social events when we (1) operate within a paradigm, dominant in history and cognate
disciplines, alerting us to the concatenation of deterministic, voluntaristic and contingent factors
as the efficient cause of a given outcome and (2) enquire, as we often do, how far the outcome
was brought about by the ‘active’ voluntary acts of human subjects and how far it was shaped by
deterministic processes and contingencies in which the actors responded ‘passively’.
Key words: cause, chance, compatibilism, contingency, determinism, explanation, freedom,
moral, responsibility
Introduction
In making sense of the world, we regularly employ a range of distinctions. Many of them are
dichotomies: man and woman; natural and artificial; mind and body; and countless others. Some
of them are trichotomies: past, present, and future; man, the state, and the international system;
and many more. We usually take these distinctions for granted and do not often spend time
thinking deeply about how something differs from something else within a given scheme of
things; their difference seems quite obvious.
In this paper I examine a fairly persistent conventional distinction in the study of history
and society in general, and of international relations in particular, between offering a causal
explanation and making a moral judgment. I have written elsewhere against the practice of
drawing a sharp distinction between ‘explaining’ and ‘understanding’,2 but here, my aim is to
investigate the connection between ‘causal explanation’ and ‘moral judgement’.
Let me say a few words first about how I have come to be interested in this subject.
When I was an undergraduate in International Relations in the late 1960s, we students, I recall,
were still learning to become positivists and in particular to embrace its key principle, the
fact/value divide; and it was, we were taught, objective facts that we needed to establish or learn
about, but not values, as these were merely subjective and ultimately arbitrary. E. H. Carr’s
seminal work was regularly invoked to reinforce such a line.3 Even in the study of international
law, dominated by legal positivism, it was what the law ‘is’ on a given issue, and not what it
‘ought to be’, that we were overwhelmingly taught to study. Another approach deemed
legitimate in this connection was a sociology of international law, an investigation into the
interactions between legal and non-legal facts about international society.
I recall defending my interest in international law against one realist sceptic – he was
then, in 1970, a strategic studies specialist – by pointing out that I was studying ‘what the law
1
Presented at the Millennium Conference October 2010.
Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1991); Hidemi Suganami, ‘Narrative Explanation and International Relations: Back to Basics’, Millennium
Vol. 37 No. 2 (2008), 327-356.
3
See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939).
2
2
says, and how it works, as a matter of fact’, adding that much of what I read in the strategic
studies literature at that time were debates about how ‘force ought to be used’, not intrinsically
different from what Carr found in the ‘Utopian’ writings of his time. To this, the ‘strategist’
replied that, as far as he was concerned, he was only interested in finding out how ‘force was
actually used’. Such a conversation would not have made much sense outside the culture, then
mainstream in IR in the UK, where the empirical was sharply divided from, and was given clear
priority over, the normative.
When, a few years later, I got to know a fellow postgraduate who, having come from a
different educational background, excelled in the art of substantive moral argumentation, I was
deeply impressed by his skills of persuasive moral advocacy, but his classmates, including
myself, tended to treat him as a very special case – someone who did, unlike most others,
normative international relations theory. The fact/value divide was still at work to sustain that
nomenclature and legitimize that category of activity.4
Now, in the new century, the situation as I perceive it is quite different. It is not at all
uncommon to hear people say, at university seminars and academic conferences, that they are, of
course, aware that our normative position cannot be separated from our empirical research, or
something of that kind, while the audience either say nothing in protest or nod quietly in
agreement – as if simply to reconfirm that positivism, or its doctrine of the fact-value divide, is a
long-dead horse. I have often wondered how precisely, in their view, the normative and the
empirical are interrelated. An uncritical subscription to the fact/value divide should not be
replaced by an unthinking acceptance of the fact/value inseparability. Besides, two things which
are said to be inseparable could not be one and the same item – think of the North Pole and the
South Pole – and therefore how and why one thing connects, or seeps through, to the other needs
to be explicated. Such an exploration is all the more important because there are also those who
firmly believe – and, I might add, not at all implausibly – that there is clear difference between
the act of explaining and that of evaluating, and, in particular, between establishing causal
responsibility and attributing moral responsibility.5
There may be a number of ways of exploring this.6 In the analytical philosophy of
history, which, as I have argued elsewhere,7 constitutes a valuable, though much neglected, body
of literature for the students of international relations, both the nature of explanation in history
and the relationships between historians’ values and their writings have been among its key
concerns for some decades.8 This paper’s special focus, however, is the intersection of these two
This ‘fellow postgraduate’ subsequently became the 10 th Woodrow Wilson Professor of International
Politics at Aberystwyth University where the ‘strategic studies specialist’, for his part, came to hold the first E. H.
Carr Chair there. However, Carr, himself the most famous holder of the Woodrow Wilson Chair, came meantime to
be somewhat distanced from the ‘realist’ tradition in the disciplinary history of IR except in the minds of an
obstinate few. See Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 101-111; Ken Booth, ‘Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice’,
International Affairs 67 (1991), 527-545; Andrew Linklater, ‘The Transformation of Political Community: E.H.
Carr, Critical Theory and International Relations’, Review of International Studies 23 (1997), 321-38. Compare
John J. Mearsheimer, ‘E.H. Carr vs. Idealism: The Battle Rages On’, International Relations 19 (2005), 139-152.
5
See Toni Erskine, ‘Introduction: Making Sense of “Responsibility” in International Relations – Key
Questions and Concepts’, in Erskine (ed.), Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and
International Relations (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1-16, at 16 note 29.
6
See, for example, Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the
Contemporary Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1998), 3rd edition, 54-71.
7
Hidemi Suganami, ‘Narrative Explanation and International Relations: Back to Basics’, Millennium 37
(2008), 327-356.
8
The literature on causal explanation in history and the relationships between historians’ works and their
values is too vast to list here. Among the more recent issues of History and Theory, we find History and Theory 43
(2004), dedicated to “Historians and Ethics;” and History and Theory 47 (2008) includes a “Forum on Historical
Explanation.” One of the contributors to the latter, Tor Egil Førland, also wrote a noteworthy article, “The Ideal
4
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concerns; it examines how and why the normative (and, more specifically, one’s moral stance or
judgement) gets into the empirical/explanatory (and, in particular, one’s causal explanation of an
event, where ‘an event’ is understood broadly to include an act or a situation).
I wish to discuss this by building on the works of two historians who offer exceptionally
valuable philosophical insights into the writing of history and one analytical philosopher of
history who has been somewhat unusual among his peers in engaging in detail with the
explanations historians have actually offered. These are Paul Veyne (1930-), James Joll (19181984), and W. H. Dray (1921-). I expand on these three scholars’ writings regarding,
respectively, the conventional structure of historical explanation, the degree of freedom with
which politicians must be deemed to make their choices even in the midst of highly warconducive international crises, and the concepts of causation historians regularly employ in
making sense of the outbreaks of war.9 Their writings have been widely read but the works
examined in this paper do not appear to have attracted the attention they deserve; or, if they have,
they have not been studied together, as far as I am aware.10 As for the IR community, none of
the three authors has had any noticeable impact on it individually or collectively apart from Joll,
whose work on international history was, and perhaps still is, a standard undergraduate text for
the historical component of the discipline. It is my view, however, that reading the three
authors’ ideas together will help us considerably in addressing the subject of this paper and that
IR scholars, and especially those who are engaged in historical investigations, will benefit
significantly from studying them.
By ‘historical investigations’ here I mean studies of how a particular event (including an
act or a situation) came to take place. ‘Process-tracing’ is in fact an appropriate generic name for
what such studies entail. I use the label, ‘historian’, to refer to anyone – with or without a
relevant academic qualification, and by profession or otherwise – who engages in such
investigations. IR scholars who conduct historical investigations, or whilst conducting them, are
‘historians’, therefore, as the designation is used throughout this paper.
In what follows, I want first to say a few words about what I understand by ‘explanation’.
Then, elaborating on Veyne’s argument, I will expound my understanding of causal explanation
in history, by which I mean an explanation of how the relevant segment of the world moved on
along the axis of time from where the outcome in question had not yet occurred to the point
where it did, that is, a causal history explaining the process of transition from some point up to
the occurrence of the event in question. My detailed explication of Veyne’s triad, conducted in
the main body of this paper, will lead me, in its penultimate section which builds on the works of
Joll and Dray, to indicate how moral judgments come to seep through to this form of
explanation; and I shall offer my understanding of why this is so in my discussion at the end.
Explanatory Text in History: A Plea for Ecumenism,” History and Theory, 43 (2004), 321-40. A very brief outline
of philosophical discussions concerning the nature of historical explanation is found in David Carr, “Narrative
Explanation and its Malcontents,” History and Theory 47 (2008), 19-30. On the relationships between historians’
works and their values, see Historians and Social Values, ed. by Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2000) and Thomas L. Haskell’s engagement with this book, “Objectivity: Perspective
as Problem and Solution,” History and Theory 43 (2004), 341-59.
9
Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, transl. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984); James Joll, “Politicians and the Freedom to Choose: The Case of July 1914,” in
The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979),
99-114; and W. H. Dray, “Concepts of Causation in A. J. P. Taylor’s Accounts of the Origins of the Second World
War,” History and Theory 17(1978), 149-74; W. H. Dray, “A Controversy over Causes: A. J. P. Taylor and the
Origins of the Second World War,” in W. H. Dray, Perspectives on History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1980), 69-96.
10
Stephen A. Vann, in his thoughtful essay, “Historians and Moral Evaluations,” History and Theory 43
(2004), 3-30, briefly notes Dray’s key argument published in another place.
4
I should add that in writing this paper, I have been motivated by one of my deep concerns
– to explore how two apparently irreconcilable positions may turn out not to be so starkly
opposed to each other after all. One way of exploring this type of issue may be to get the
adversaries to talk to each other across their divide. But this approach may not be very helpful
where the divide in question is based on a particular distinction which the two parties both accept
as constituting their respective identities. Two groups of IR scholars, defining themselves as
‘empirical’ and ‘normative’ against each other, are not likely to bridge the gap between them
unless they reflect on the empirical/normative divide itself. In my view this can only be
achieved through analytical reflection and articulation and therefore it does not have to involve a
dialogue in the literal sense between the parties to the opposing positions; indeed, a dialogue
itself is of no help unless it is oriented towards analysing the conventional juxtaposition which
makes it a dialogue. This paper, then, is an application of my long-held practical belief that
articulacy is a precondition of reconciliation, dialogically or otherwise.
Explaining
The Oxford English Dictionary lists some older meanings of the verb ‘to explain’. They include:
to ‘smooth out, make smooth, take out roughness from’; to ‘open out, unfold, spread out flat (a
material object)’. The Dictionary’s illustrations are very interesting: ‘The left hand explained
into a Palme’; ‘The Horse-Chestnut is … ready to explain its leaf’; ‘Beetles … have … Wings …
so disposed as to fold up or explain themselves at the Will of the Insect’.
These examples point to another meaning of the verb: to ‘make plainly visible; to
display’. This then relates to ‘to give details of’, to ‘make plain or intelligible’, ‘to clear of
obscurity or difficulty’, and further to ‘[t]o assign a meaning to, state the meaning or import of;
to interpret’, to ‘make clear the cause, origin, or reason of; to account for’, to ‘make one’s
meaning clear and intelligible, speak plainly’.
The verb ‘to explicate’, which now more commonly means ‘to give a detailed account of’
or to ‘bring out what is implicitly contained in (a notion, principle, proposition)’ also used to
mean to ‘unfold, unroll; to smooth out (wrinkles); to open out (what is wrapped up); to expand
(buds, leaves, etc.)’, to ‘spread out’; to ‘disentangle, unravel’. Interestingly, the German verb,
‘auslegen’ also means ‘to spread out’ and ‘to explain’, to unfold in words.
It is well to note here that the range of things we can make less obscure and can thereby
be said to ‘explain’ is very broad indeed. We can explain what a word means; how or through
what path a certain event led to, or caused, another; what reason someone had in acting in a
certain way; what it was that he or she was doing; what, under a given principle, is or is not
permitted; why or on what basis the principle can be deemed worthy of respect; what the story
you have just read is all about; what type of story it is; how you can get there from here; why a
square root of 2 is not a rational number; and so on. These are of course substantive questions,
to which we can add meta-level questions, such as: what method of enquiry we may use to
address these questions; what sort of knowledge it is that we gain by answering them; and what
the world must be like for it to be meaningful for us to explore answers to them in the ways we
do – in other words, methodological, epistemological and ontological questions.
Clearly, then, explanatory enterprise covers an enormous range. It is unsurprising
therefore that acts of explaining do not follow a single path.11 Although the purposes are the
11
The deductive-nomological, or covering-law, model of explanation, for instance, was advanced as a model
for a specifically scientific explanation of an occurrence of an event formulated on the unity-of-science supposition
that all explanations of events, including historians’, must follow it to be taken seriously as seeking objective
knowledge. See C. G. Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and
Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science, (New York: Free Press, 1965), 231-43. For a number of by now familiar
5
same – whatever it is that we explain, we do so to reduce the puzzlement it has caused, or should
have caused, in us – there is no single model of explanation that shows what we do, or should do,
when we engage in the activity of explaining. This is because explanation works by addressing
questions and the questions we ask in articulating our puzzlement are not uniform. Explaining
what a given word means is not the same sort of exercise as, say, explaining the significance of a
particular event as a cause of another; they address different kinds of question.
There is another important point to notice about the activity of explaining: its
communicative, social and cultural nature. It is not possible to explain anything to someone who
understands nothing.12 It is when we understand, or have an understanding of, a range of things,
but are puzzled about some specific thing, that we seek an explanation. The explanation offered
fills a gap in our understanding. Explaining is an act of communicating one’s understanding of
something to another person. This means that the ‘explainer’ and the ‘explainee’ need to have
certain understandings in common; without this sharing of a body of knowledge, explaining
could not get going.
One of the key ingredients of this shared body of knowledge is a set of understandings
about how particular types of question are to be answered and what kinds of answer count as
answers to them. Such understandings will no doubt vary historically and cross-culturally. In
any given historical period or cultural space, the degree to which there is a consensus on how to
answer a given question, or what an answer looks like, may depend on the type of question being
asked, and there may well be some types of question in addressing which a variety of ways are
found to be practised.13 Nevertheless, there would have to be some epistemic convergence
before explanation, as a communicative act, could take place. One important illustration of such
convergence is found in the dominant conventional way in which causal explanations are given
in relation to historical processes in the human social sphere.14
Articulating Veyne
Causal explanations historians offer consist of three key ingredients. I became clearly aware of
the tripartite frame, and of its apparent pervasiveness in our conventional thinking, including
historians’, when I came upon a book by Paul Veyne, called Writing History: Essay on
Epistemology. He wrote:
History is a matter of understanding… [I]n order to understand the past, it is sufficient to
view it with the same eyes we use to understand the world around us or the life of a
foreign people. It is sufficient to view the past in this way in order to see in it the three
kinds of causes we discover around us as soon as we open our eyes: the nature of things,
human freedom, and chance. Such are, according to the Peripatetics … the three kinds of
efficient causes that rule the sublunary world and that Wilhelm von Humboldt, in one of
reasons, I consider this model to be a misguided one for scientific explanation itself, but this does not need to detain
us here. See, inter alia, Rom Harré, The Philosophies of Science: an Introductory Survey (London: Oxford
University Press, 1972); Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (London: Verso, 2008).
12
S. Scriven, “Truisms as the Grounds for Historical Explanation,” in Theories of History, ed. P. Gardiner
(London: Collier Macmillan, 1959), 443-75, at 449.
13
On this last observation, see Førland, “The Ideal Explanatory Text in History: A Plea for Ecumenism.”
14
To think of “historical processes in the human social sphere” as constituting a discrete realm may already
be to view the world through a historically contingent, culturally specific, politically and ethically significant filter
which separates the human social realm from the natural and the divine. See Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of
History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004).
6
the finest essays ever written on history, describes as the three kinds of motivating causes
of universal history.15
According to Veyne, the tripartite division – ‘Veyne’s triad’ – appears repeatedly in
classical writings, including those of Plato, Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Tacitus, St
Thomas, and Dante.16 Note, however, that Veyne’s triad is said by him to relate specifically to a
class of causes known as ‘efficient’ causes. This is curious; a brief explanation on this point is in
order.
As Heidegger points out, philosophy had taught for centuries that there were four kinds
of cause: the material cause, or the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; the
formal cause, the form or the shape into which the material enters; the final cause, or the end, the
purpose – for example, the sacrificial rite for which the chalice is made; and, last but not least,
the efficient cause.17 Heidegger explains the ‘efficient cause’ as that which ‘brings about the
effect’ and points to the silversmith as the efficient cause of the chalice.18 However, as he notes,
the idea of the efficient cause, understood as that which brings about the outcome does not in
fact appear in Aristotle himself.19 What Aristotle wrote about was something quite different: that
which initiates a change rather than brings about an outcome.20 Aristotle was in effect
articulating a conventional explanatory framework of his time concerning change, comprising
the material and the form, the beginning and the end. But the idea of the efficient cause – in the
sense of that which brings about, or effectuates, the outcome – came later to dominate our
thinking about change.21 I believe Veyne’s triad concerns efficient causes in this sense which,
from now on, I shall simply call ‘causes’.22
Veyne’s contention, therefore, is that historical causes – or those factors which, in
combination, (are presented as having) brought about given outcomes in history – are (thought to
be) attributable to the three sources, the nature of things, human freedom and chance, underlying
what I shall call ‘deterministic (or mechanistic) processes’, ‘voluntary actions’, and ‘chance
occurrences’, respectively.23
Veyne, Writing History, 105. The “Peripatetics” were members of the school of philosophy founded by
Aristotle. The name derives from the Greek verb, “to walk about.” Legend has it that Aristotle used to do that when
he lectured. This apparently caused his pupils literally to follow the master as he meandered through the colonnades
at the Lyceum. The “sublunary world” is a region between the Earth and just under the Moon’s orbit. “In contrast
to the orderly, incorruptible character of the super-lunar region, the sub-lunar region [in the Aristotelian view] was
marked by change, growth and decay, generation and corruption.” A. F. Chalmers, What is This Thing Called
Science? 2nd ed. (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1982), 69. To say that the tripartite scheme seems
pervasive is only to point to that apparent historical fact. It is not at all the same as formulating a model of
explanation dogmatically from some a priori standpoint, on which see Paul A. Roth, “Three Dogmas (More or Less)
of Explanation,” History and Theory 47 (2008), 57-68.
16
Veyne, Writing History, 307.
17
Martin Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology,” in The Question concerning Technology and
Other Essays, transl. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3-35, at 3.
18
Heidegger, “Technology,” 3.
19
Heidegger, “Technology,” 7-8.
20
That “from which comes the beginning of change” is how Aristotle explains the idea in The Metaphysics,
transl. with an Introduction by Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 12; “the original source of
change” is his formulation in Physics, transl. by Robin Waterfield and with an Introduction and Notes by David
Bostock, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 39.
21
Heidegger, “Technology,” 7.
22
See, however, Milja Kurki, Causation in International Relations: Reclaiming Causal Analysis
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), which commends the Aristotelian framework.
23
The process through which a given outcome is brought about begins somewhere. There is of course no
natural beginning point to a process, but it must be specified, and the initial conditions – or how things were at the
start – need to be grasped before an explanation can be offered. In addition to the three key ingredients, therefore,
an account of the background usually forms part of an explanation.
15
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It may rightly be doubted that those earlier thinkers Veyne mentions in his book who
apparently spoke of the triad and its components thought the same way as we nowadays tend to
do when we think of history in these terms. There is little doubt, however, that, in our
contemporary thinking about events in the human social sphere, we commonly accept the
tripartite classification of causal factors and treat it in a taken-for-granted manner.24 Here is one
striking illustration:
A causality of determinism dominates the depressed person, for whom everything seems
to result from the pressure of circumstances over which he or she has no control. A
causality of chance dominates the manic, for whom nothing happens according to any
deterministic order and the future looms fraught with possibility – unpredictable and
anxiety-provoking. A causality of intentionality dominates the paranoid, for whom
nothing is the result of chance and everything is caused by menacing thoughts and deeds
directed toward the patient.25
This passage is especially noteworthy not because it employs the tripartite division in
making sense of its specific subject-matter (which is fairly commonly done in any case) but
because it also suggests that a skewed use of the triad is itself a symptom of mental illness and
that therefore its more balanced use signals a more objective mind. The idea seems to be that
such a mind can see the world more accurately, which, in turn, tends to suggest that, according to
this way of thinking, the three kinds of cause are constituents of the world as it is (rather than
merely a conventional way of representing it). This may exaggerate the significance of the
tripartite divide; it ‘ontologizes’ what is perhaps no more than a historically and culturally
specific set of epistemic categories. According to Agnes Heller, for example, the tripartite
scheme is merely an ‘organizing principle of historiography’.26 Still, the triad, clearly, is very
extensively used in causal discussions with respect to the human social world and it is useful to
bear this in mind when reflecting on particular causal diagnoses which we or others offer on a
wide range of events.
Veyne’s three key concepts, and their interrelationships, however, require some
elucidation to enable us to understand what the triad is really made of and appreciate how the
scheme works together. First, let me analyze the three key concepts: deterministic processes,
chance, and voluntary actions. What follows is an exercise in conceptual elucidation, directed
ultimately towards a better understanding of how and why causality and morality may intertwine
in the way we make sense of our past.
Deterministic processes
Although this may sound like a terminological self-contradiction, it is well to remind ourselves
that “deterministic” processes do not necessarily determine the actual outcomes. As Bhaskar
rightly stresses, this only happens under experimental conditions or in closed systems free of
Thus, even for one of the most nomothetically-oriented American political scientists: “All social events
may be thought of as the outcome of a concatenation of some deterministic, stochastic, and voluntaristic elements.”
See J. D. Singer, “The Historical Experiment as a Research Strategy in the Study of World Politics,” in The
Correlates of War, ed. J. D. Singer, vol. 1 Research Origins and Rationale (New York: Free Press, 1979), 184. E.
H. Carr employs the same tripartite classification to frame his discussion of historical causation in his What is
History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), chap 4.
25
Stephen Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1-2, emphasis added.
26
Agnes Heller, A Theory of History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 173.
24
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interference.27 In an open space, by contrast, many deterministic processes work together, some
counteracting, and some reinforcing, one another. There are also human interventions and
unexpected chance occurrences affecting the goings-on. Given this, a specific result expected
from the working of a single deterministic process is not always, or even regularly, observed in
the world of our everyday experiences.
This is why causal laws are difficult to identify especially in the human social sphere.
But that does not mean that deterministic processes are not present, or not at work, in societies
and in inter-societal relations. They are; and they shape all kinds of phenomena we observe –
war and peace, poverty and prosperity, upturns and downturns in our suicide rates.
There is more to discuss about the nature of deterministic processes, but this is best done
in relation to the other two ingredients of the triad.
Chance occurrences
The idea of chance is a puzzling one but two things seem clear. We would not characterize an
event as a chance occurrence if it is known to have been brought about deliberately by a human
act. Neither would we consider an event as a matter of chance if we could explain its occurrence
in the light of our knowledge of relevant deterministic processes. In other words, a chance
occurrence is one which we cannot explain by the other two factors in the triad, by human
interventions or by deterministic processes.
The first point I have just made, regarding human intervention and chance, does not
require further elaboration; it will be understood that a ‘deliberate murder’, for instance, is not an
accident (or, to put it more precisely, an incident so characterized would not count as an
accident). But the second observation, regarding chance and deterministic processes, requires
some further analysis. Three alternative interpretations appear to emerge.
First, it may be that those who use the word ‘chance’ in characterizing the occurrence of
an event are thinking that it was genuinely uncaused. We may call this the indeterminist concept
of chance. In stating that those who talk of ‘chance’ may do so in the indeterminist sense, I am
not arguing for or against the notion of an uncaused event but simply suggesting that some
people use the concept of chance in the indeterminist way.28 According to this idea of chance, a
chance occurrence is not something we can explain in the light of deterministic processes
because there is none that is relevant.
Second, it may be that what we call a matter of chance is subject to certain known
deterministic processes, but in such a subtle and complex way that the outcome is totally
unpredictable each time. This scenario operates, for example, when a racket is spun to decide
who serves first in a tennis match. Let me call this the gambler’s notion of chance.
In saying that ‘the outcome is totally unpredictable each time’, I am pointing to the fact
that the racket, when spun, may end up facing one way or the other and that we cannot predict
the outcome when the racket begins to spin or while it is still spinning fast. As the spin slows
down and the racket is about to fall to the ground, there may come a moment when we can say
which way it is going to face; the outcome may become predictable at that point. But the
outcome cannot be predicted when the spin begins because a large number of influences at the
beginning and in the middle part shape the course of the spin in subtle and complex ways; and,
27
Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science.
Here I follow the usage whereby “determinism” is a doctrine that everything that happens is caused and
“indeterminism” a contrary doctrine that not everything that happens is caused. A particular instance of atomic
decay is said to be a matter of chance in the sense, according to some, that its occurrence is uncaused; it is a case of
“spontaneous nuclear disintegration.” See Peter Railton, “Probability, Explanation, and Information,” Synthese, 48
(1981), 233-56, at 235. This, however, is an area I need not go into in this article. See further Wesley C. Salmon,
Causality and Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
28
9
importantly, each time the racket is spun, the influencing factors combine and work in different
ways so that the outcomes, in a series, are not inter-related as collateral effects of the same set of
conditions. Over a long run, therefore, we expect the outcomes to be roughly 50% one way and
50% the other – unless the racket used is biased. If, however, there are more than two possible
outcomes, the chances of an outcome having a particular set of characteristics will diminish
accordingly, giving rise to the idea that a matter of chance is a low probability event.
Third, it may be that what we call a matter of chance refers to a fortuitous co-incidence.
This is a simultaneous occurrence, or synchronicity, of two or more events, where each event is
known or assumed to have been caused, but where there is no known explanation as to why they
were made to happen at the same time. This may be called a happenchance sense of chance.
Note here that a happenchance sense of chance does not require that the two events
occurring simultaneously be outcomes of deterministic processes; one or both of them may have
been brought about by voluntary actions. Note also that, if we only bother to look for them
(almost pointlessly other than for the purpose of this particular demonstration) we can see that
our world is in fact filled with events that happen at the same time by chance; my cat yawns as a
leaf falls off a tree in my garden. But it is only a very small proportion of such plentiful
coincidences that retrospectively enters our historical accounts as having had significant
impacts.29
It is interesting to ask whether (1) low-probability chance events in the gambler’s notion
of chance and (2) chance coincidences in the happenchance sense are distinct concepts. A ball
rolling down and hitting a particular tree at the bottom of a hill (as opposed to hitting something
else or getting stuck some midway location) may be an instance of (1); but we can also construe
the scenario as an intersection of two causally independent chains of events at a given time – the
ball took a particular path downhill and the tree, planted some years ago, has grown in thickness
exactly to the size that is required for it to be successfully hit by the ball. If, instead, we imagine
the ball to have hit someone who happened to be cycling across the bottom of the hill, it is easy
to see that the case illustrates both (1) and (2), indicating that the two may not be distinct
concepts. But, for the purpose of my argument, there is no need to develop this line of thinking
further. I wish instead to give an example of how the idea of chance works in historical
interpretations.
Pascal, a major contributor to probability theory, is well known for his aphorism that if
Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been changed. In the
relevant passage, Pascal wrote that, to appreciate the emptiness of human existence, it is enough
to observe how easily men fall in love, apparently for nothing, and what momentous
consequences this can have.30 If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, Pascal was suggesting,
Antony (or Caesar before him) would not have been infatuated by her, and the course of history
would thereby have altered significantly. ‘Cleopatra’s nose’ has since become another name for
the role of chance in history.
In what sense, though, can her nose be considered to have been a chance factor in
history? Was the shape of her nose un-caused? I suspect not. Was the shape of her nose a
matter of chance in the sense that she could just as easily have turned out to look quite different,
given what we know about genetics and Cleopatra’s ancestry? Perhaps. But, I suggest, it is the
third, happenchance sense of chance that is the key here. Egypt had a queen, exceptionally
beautiful with a perfect nose, at that particular juncture in the history of the Eastern
Mediterranean, increasingly controlled by a Rome led by lustful and fickle men. There may not
have been anything unusual in the fact that the men who led Rome then were lustful and fickle.
29
On the causal impact of contingencies, see Richard Ned Lebow, Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals in
International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
30
Blaise Pascal, Les Pensées de Pascal ed. By F. Kaplan (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1982), 209.
10
But at that particular juncture when Rome was expanding into the Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt
could easily have been led by someone without the exceptional beauty of Cleopatra. That it was
otherwise at that point – a decisive factor in Pascal’s teasing interpretation – was a matter of
chance, a fortuitous coincidence.
It should be clear that the reasoning here applies to any so-called ‘great man’
interpretation of history. The alleged greatness of the historical figure in question is assumed to
have its causes. But his or her personal qualities are thought to be causally external to the
development of the circumstances which he or she then begins to affect in significant ways.
Chance occurrences in history are tangential interventions in its processes; focusing on them,
some historians present a historical process as though it were mainly a series of accidents.31
Voluntary actions
As the discussion above shows, things are somewhat more complex than Veyne makes them out
to be when discussing his triad. And here is another difficult question: what is this thing called
‘a voluntary action’ and how does that differ from the other two in the triad?
The problem is this. If ‘a voluntary action’ means an action stemming from one’s will,
but the content of one’s will at a given moment is acknowledged, in turn, to have been formed,
or caused, by something else, then the distinction becomes blurred between a process of someone
performing a voluntary action and a deterministic process. If, on the other hand, in a voluntary
action properly so-called, the actor’s will is to be seen as not having been caused at all, then the
difference becomes hard to see between a voluntary action and a chance occurrence (understood
in the indeterminist sense). So, to sustain the tripartite division, we must think a little harder
about what this thing called ‘a voluntary action’ is. To explore this, let me use the example of a
silversmith that we saw Heidegger employ in explicating the four kinds of cause.
Regardless of what Aristotle may or may not have thought when he spoke of a ‘producer’
causing a product or a ‘changer’ causing a change,32 the silversmith is precisely that – a
producer, a changer. But, clearly, the silversmith does not act as if he were omnipotent God,
supposedly the Author of all. We mortals are drastically more circumscribed in what we do than
any superhuman existences we care to imagine. The silversmith acts in the context of his
particular circumstances and they circumscribe his actions. We could even imagine him to be
working in a Fordist factory, compelled to produce a small component of a chalice in large
quantities for many hours every working day – though, obviously, not in ancient Greece.
The silversmith’s circumstances circumscribe his actions, but, of course, as is often
pointed out in relation to such cases, they also make him what he is, facilitate his life, enable him
to act appropriately to his context. Note that all these verbs, ‘to circumscribe’, ‘to make’, ‘to
facilitate’, and ‘to enable’ are causative verbs. This means that the silversmith’s circumstances
are themselves a causal agent – an ‘agent’ not in the usual, narrower sense of a person who acts,
but in the broader sense in which, for example, a chemical agent is an agent; it is a producer of
change. 33 This reminds us that the opposite of an agent is not a structure as it is sometimes
presented to be (and almost invariably so in the IR theory literature) – for social structures are
31
See A. J. P. Taylor, “Accident Prone, or What Happened Next,” Journal of Modern History 49 (1977), 1-
18.
32
Aristotle, Physics, 39.
Similarly to my observation here, Bruno Latour suggests that “anything that does modify a state of affairs
by making a difference is an actor.” Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71, emphasis Latour’s.
33
11
also causal agents – but a ‘patient’, a passive partner, someone who is about to be acted upon, or
treated, by a doctor, a dentist, or unspeakably worse, a torturer.34
Now, although the silversmith’s circumstances do circumscribe his conduct, he is not an
entirely passive object of his circumstances either; they also provide him with agency (or causal
powers) and in any case he may – with his ‘inner strengths’, whatever may explain them – resist
the circumscribing power of his circumstances rather than merely conform to them. In other
words, he is at once an agent and a patient.
That is how we would generally make sense of what the silversmith was doing in his
circumstances. And, clearly, this is not confined just to this particular instance. This is an
illustration of how we, including historians, commonly make sense of how people in general act
and interact. I propose to call such an understanding of human conduct an ‘agent-patient’ model.
According to this model, people are considered to be at once agents and patients, active and
passive, in what they do; and we may say their actions are ‘voluntary’ to the extent that we do
not consider them as pure patients, acting entirely passively as coerced by, and simply moving in
accordance with, forces external to them. In other words, ‘voluntary actions’ result from sources
deemed external and internal to the actors in varying degrees.35
Two points may be added here. First, it may be noted that if, for example, I surrender my
wallet to a gunman, that is hardly a ‘voluntary’ act since I will be acting under duress. But there
may be said to be an element of activeness in what I do: I choose to surrender my wallet to avoid
very probable physical harm. And, of course, suicide bombers would consider themselves as
‘volunteers’ (and we may well accept this description) even though they are most likely to be
acting under overwhelming social pressures. I therefore allow the label ‘voluntary’ to be used
quite broadly as explained above.36 Second, even a patient under torture is not necessarily a pure
object of his circumstances. Although this is too gruesome even simply to contemplate, his
strength of character or conviction – which we usually treat as internal or integral to his very
being – may be such that he would refuse to confess and survive the ordeal or defy the aims of
his interrogator by choosing to be killed. Even he could avoid becoming a pure patient, indeed
heroically so, given his options.
Digesting Veyne
The foregoing analysis of Veyne’s three key concepts may be summed up briefly as follows. In
deterministic processes, their outcomes, if they do occur, come about naturally, when the
processes are left to work their ways out without hindrance. It is common to express this by
saying that, when left to their own devices, the processes complete themselves mechanistically –
as if there really were a mechanical device underlying the deterministic processes. Deterministic
“The spectators were all edified by the solicitude of the parish priest of St Paul’s who despite his great age
did not spare himself in offering consolation to the patient.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, transl. by Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 3, emphasis added.
35
Similarly, Bruno Latour points out that an “actor is made to act by many others,” that “[b]y definition,
action is dislocated,” and that “[i]f an actor is said to be an actor-network, it is first of all to underline that it
represents the major source of uncertainty about the origin of action.” Latour, Reassembling the Social, 16,
emphases Latour’s.
36
Interestingly, Hannah Arendt observes that in Aristotle, “[a]n act in which I am under threat of violence
but am not physically coerced would have counted as voluntary.” Hannah Arendt, The Life of Mind, Vol. 2 Willing
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 16. The idea of “the self” seems invariably to involve the distinction between
what is inside and outside it; and where the line is drawn appears to be closely linked with the historically and
socially dominant ethical discourse. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
34
12
processes, therefore, may also be called ‘mechanistic’.37 A ‘chance’ occurrence may or may not
mean an uncaused occurrence. If it does not, it is either an unpredictable outcome of complex
deterministic processes or a simultaneous occurrence of two or more events each of which is
known or assumed to have been caused, but the cause of whose synchronicity is (treated as)
unknown. In voluntary actions, as we saw, the outcomes, or the acts, are deemed to result partly
from the circumstances external to the actors and partly from the conditions internal or integral
to them – in a sense yet to be explained.38 There are a number of observations I wish to make at
this point.
First, if we provisionally remove the idea that a chance occurrence is genuinely uncaused
– an idea which historians in any case are unlikely to work with – we will note that Veyne’s triad
is consistent with the doctrine of determinism, or the belief that every event is caused (which is
not to say that every event is predestined.)
Second, intentionality appears to be central to the idea of voluntariness. Significantly, we
may suggest that what distinguishes voluntary actions from deterministic (or mechanistic)
processes is the presence of intentionality in the former and its absence from the latter. Indeed,
there is an important sense in which a voluntary action differs from an involuntary bodily
movement, such as nervous twitching, and this has to do with the fact that the former, unlike the
latter, is intended and therefore subjected to conscious monitoring and control.39 However, it
appears incorrect to equate ‘voluntary’ with ‘intentional’ actions.
Much of what we do, for example, out of habit, is done without any thinking on our part
and therefore not intended in the full sense of being subjected to our conscious monitoring and
control. Yet, we would not therefore think of our habitual conduct as ‘not voluntary’. We are
likely to have acquired or developed a habit over a period, but now that it has become our habit,
we just do it in the way in which it makes little sense to wonder about its voluntariness or
otherwise.
One way out of this conceptual untidiness may be to say that habitual patterns of
behaviour are instances of deterministic processes – we engage in them automatically given the
appropriate stimuli, like the clock saying, ‘it’s time for a coffee’ – but this shows that the
category of deterministic processes is not watertight and includes some ‘softer’ (or in-varyingdegrees alterable) varieties at the edges (as indeed it should if it is going to play any part in
historical explanations). This, in turn, leads us to suggest that Veyne’s ‘deterministic processes’
and ‘voluntary actions’ are not mutually exclusive classificatory categories but more or less
distinct clusters around their respective archetypes, which are deterministic processes of nature
or machinery, on the one hand, and un-coerced intentional actions performed by human agents,
on the other.40
This leads me to my third observation. Veyne’s triad, underlying and enabling causal
explanations of social events is also integral to our moral thinking and practices. Deterministic
or mechanistic processes of nature and machinery are not subject to moral evaluation whereas
intentional actions are; and the more un-coerced given intentional actions are presented to be, the
37
Of course, there really is a mechanical device if the process in question is the working out of a man-made
machine; otherwise, the idea of a mechanical device is a metaphor.
38
Even a machine works in the way it does partly due to the circumstances external to it and partly due to the
conditions internal or integral to it; so the distinction between mechanistic processes and voluntary actions has not
been explained.
39
To use a standard illustration, a thermostat monitors the temperature and controls it, but not ‘consciously’;
the thermostat, while responsive to the environment, is not attentive to it, nor attentive to its own attentiveness.
40
What is to count as “un-coerced” is not transparent, however.
13
more morally blameworthy, or praiseworthy, they are deemed to be.41 The distinction between
‘deterministic processes’ and ‘voluntary actions’ is not only a basic tool with which we make
sense of our world but also a fundamental means with which we construct our moral lives. It
will not be surprising, therefore, if causal explanations of events in the human social world and
moral judgments are found closely inter-related.
However, deterministic processes in society, unlike in nature, are not in principle
unalterable, or are revealed not to be so. This means that they, too, come under moral scrutiny,
leading to an important set of moral and political questions regarding whether and how far they
are alterable, whether they should be altered, and, if so, by what means and with what
consequences.
My fourth observation relates to the following puzzle: if historians, using Veyne’s triad,
are, as I argued, ‘determinists’, how is it possible for their causal accounts to be compatible with
their moral concerns? Is it not necessary for them to be indeterminists – and hold that not every
event is caused and that, in particular, human will is free – to be able in principle to enter the
realm of moral evaluation?
My response to this perennial philosophical puzzle is that historians, working within
Veyne’s triad, are determinists and compatibilists, holding not only that every event is caused
but also that this belief is compatible with the view that human actions are subject to moral
scrutiny. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that there may be some historians who
believe compatibilism to be a mistaken doctrine and reject determinism. But, in my view, this is
an unnecessary route to take.
I am not persuaded by the idea that one’s action must be uncaused for it to be subjected
to moral scrutiny. On the contrary, it is precisely because one has a capacity to cause one’s
action to conform to one’s idea of what is morally required in the given circumstances that one’s
action can be subjected to moral evaluation at all. When acting in this way, one’s action is
shaped, or caused, by one’s (holding of certain) moral beliefs. We may not be able to give a
causal explanation of where one’s capacity to cause or guide one’s action in this way comes from
(apart from suggesting perhaps that one’s early up-bringing is likely to have had something to do
with it), but that does not mean we have to assume it to be uncaused. If, therefore, historians,
working within Veyne’s triad, are determinists, as I suggest they are, they can still operate moral
thinking without abandoning their determinism.
My fifth and final observation is that Veyne’s triad may shape historical narratives at two
levels. It may shape the whole of a historical narrative told by a historian on a given subject, or it
may shape parts of it. A whole narrative may itself be a causal story focused on explaining how
it ended in a particular way, but, clearly, there are also other kinds of narrative.
At the level of the whole, then, the triad enables a historian to tell a variety of stories, but
it also appears to delimit the range. Here are a few standard types: (i) a story of heroism where
the key actors resist the deterministic forces (for example, a clear imbalance of military
capabilities in favour of the enemy, which makes their side liable to lose) and/or unexpected
contingencies detrimental to their endeavour and achieve a victory (or fail to do so) heroically;
(ii) a story in which the key actors act in accordance with their beliefs and desires but which ends
in a particular way regardless of the actors’ intentions due to the workings of certain
deterministic forces which shape the human social world; (iii) a story in which chance
occurrences interfere in such a way that almost every turn in the story (as well as its ending) is
unpredicted by the actors and the readers alike.
41
Even Kant apparently spoke of a gradation of moral responsibility, stating, for example, that “if a starving
man steals food he is less responsible for his theft than a well-fed man would be, because he is less free.” See R. C.
S. Walker, Kant: The Arguments of the Philosophers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 149.
14
To use the classification Hayden White42 is well-known for introducing to the analysis of
historical narratives, (i) is a romance; (ii) is a tragedy or a comedy, the former pointing to ‘a Fate,
greater than human power’,43 the latter hopeful of the ultimate harmony of interests;44 and (iii) is
a satire.
According to White’s analysis, romance, tragedy, comedy and satire all carry their
respective ideological implications, anarchism, radicalism, conservativism and liberalism,
respectively.45 This part of his argument seems quite underdeveloped, but I suspect it possible to
improve on his analysis by going back to Veyne’s triad and investigating how a range of stories
the triad produces embodies (implies, as well as, is sustained by) differing understandings about
the place of ‘man’ in a wider scheme of things. But that is a larger project which goes beyond
the scope of my current analysis. For the moment, I want to see how historians’ moral
judgments relate to their causal explanations regardless of whether these explanations shape the
whole narrative or they appear as its components.
Building on Joll and Dray
In an important article, entitled ‘Politicians and the Freedom to Choose: The Case of July 1914’,
James Joll places much stress on the extent to which politicians’ freedom to choose is limited.46
He suggests that ‘the range of what in practice cannot be done is perhaps wider than is generally
supposed both by participants and by subsequent historians’.47 But he is equally concerned to
point out that demonstrating this fact – that politicians are often the victims of their
circumstances, including their own misguided beliefs – is not the same as showing that their
actions were ‘determined by long-term historical forces against which they or anyone else are
powerless’.48 Constrained as they may be, they are, in Joll’s view, free in a fundamental sense
unless we can demonstrate by evidence that their actions were predetermined by some long-term
historical forces in operation.
Unlike some historians, Joll is not averse to enquiring about ‘the broad lines of social and
economic development, of demographic change or of the even longer-term effects of differences
in the climate and other aspects of the environment’,49 but he suggests that this kind of enquiry is
not of the same category as the other kind of historical enquiry, exemplified by a study of the
origins of the First World War, which looks into the decisions of individual leaders. By drawing
a clear distinction between these two modes of enquiry, Joll suggests that there is no empirical
evidence that politicians’ actions are predetermined by long-term historical forces; if there were
such evidence, the two realms of enquiry would merge. In that sense, in Joll’s judgment,
politicians are free. Furthermore, he seems to be saying that they are in principle free to choose
42
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1973).
43
It is well known that this is what the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg saw lying over the situation
in Europe and over the German people on the eve of the First World War. See Konrad Jarausch, “The Illusion of
Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s Calculated Risk, July 1914,” Central European History 2(1969), 4876 at 64.
44
E. H. Carr’s “Utopians” presented history of international politics in the nineteenth century as a “comedy”
in this sense and assumed it to be an unchanging feature of the realm. See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis.
Ned Lebow, following the “classical realism” of Thucydides, Clausewitz and Morgenthau, however, sees “tragedy”
(or tragic emplotment) as teaching us better lessons. Richrad Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics,
Interests and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
45
White, Metahistory, 29.
46
James Joll, “Politicians and the Freedom to Choose.”
47
Joll, “Politicians and the Freedom to Choose,” 111.
48
Joll, “Politicians and the Freedom to Choose,” 111.
49
Joll, “Politicians and the Freedom to Choose,” 113-14.
15
from a wider range of options than they in fact often do because their thinking is shaped by such
things as misguided beliefs. He writes:
And if the choices open to the political leaders at the time were more limited than they
themselves perhaps supposed and their freedom of action constrained by an infinite
number of earlier decisions by themselves and others, they were in a situation no
different from that of most of us; and they still had to make choices, even if the options
were limited. Where there was a difference between those in positions of political
responsibility and the rest was in the scale of the consequences of their decisions. These
decisions made a difference to the lives of several generations in a way that the decisions
of a private individual would not have done. For this reason the questions of the
inevitability of the war, or of that particular war at that date, is not one which can be
answered except in terms of individual responsibility.50
In short, according to Joll, politicians’ freedom of action is constrained by such things as
misguided beliefs and the speed of events, which make it difficult for them in practice to
consider all options, but they are still free to choose, and are responsible for what they do, to the
extent that their actions cannot be shown to have been made inevitable by some long-term
historical forces. What is implicit in this line of thinking is a belief that politicians should try to
consider a wide range of options which are in principle available to them if they free themselves
from prejudices, that they have a moral responsibility to do so because of the enormity of the
consequences of their decisions, and that their failure so to do – their failure to act morally
responsibly – forms part of an explanation of what happens as a result. In Joll’s own
explanation, therefore, we clearly see moral considerations become part of the causal explanation
offered.
But those who see causal explanation and moral judgment as epistemologically distinct
may object that Joll’s causal explanation is contaminated by his own moral stance. There is, in
any case, a tension in Joll’s own position which cannot go unnoticed – his stress on constraints
facing politicians and his insistence that they are still free agents in principle capable of choosing
from a wider range of options and acting otherwise (because their actions are not dictated by
deterministic forces). Although more liberal historians may be drawn towards the latter point,
more conservative historians will stress the extent to which there were no realistic alternatives.
Does this mean that the degree of freedom to choose on the part of politicians in their
circumstances is necessarily a matter of opinion coloured by the historians’ ideologies; is it not
possible, as Isaiah Berlin stated, that ‘[w]hat can and what cannot be done by particular agents in
specific circumstances is an empirical question, properly settled, like all such questions, by an
appeal to experience’?51 Is it not possible then to determine empirically whether politicians,
faced with some specific circumstances, were forced to act, passively, as dictated by the
circumstances or whether they chose a particular course of action actively when they could have
followed other paths?
It will be recalled that, according to the agent-patient model of the human subject, which
I used to explicate the idea of ‘voluntary actions’ in Veyne’s triad, the subject’s action is partly
active (stemming from what is internal or integral to him/her) and partly passive (coming from
the circumstances external to him/her) but voluntary to the extent that s/he is not acting entirely
passively. Some voluntary acts are therefore more active, or more passive, than others, and how
far a particular act in the given circumstances was active/passive is a question which is often
50
51
Joll, “Politicians and the Freedom to Choose,” 114, emphasis added.
Quoted in Joll, “Politicians and the Freedom to Choose,” 111.
16
addressed in explaining the occurrence of an event within Veyne’s framework. And the question
I want to raise here is this: is this a question which is ‘empirical’ in the sense in which it is
juxtaposed to ‘normative/moral’; in other words, it this a question which can be answered
without bringing in moral judgements if only implicitly?
A life-long contributor to the analytical philosophy of history, W. H. Dray has made a
decisive contribution, in my view, to answering this question in the negative. Over thirty years
ago, he published an article, entitled ‘Concepts of Causation in A. J. P. Taylor’s Account of the
Origins of the Second World War’. This was republished, with some small, but significant,
modifications in 1980, under the title, ‘A Controversy over Causes: A. J. P. Taylor and the
Origins of the Second World War’ in a collection of Dray’s own essays on the philosophy of
history. Dray’s piece, in either version, does not appear to have attracted the attention it deserves
in the historical profession or in the political science community specializing in the study of
wars. However, his analysis of the Taylor controversy, though quite tentative in parts, is
noteworthy because it highlights the intertwining of causal explanations and moral judgments in
our attempts to make sense of the occurrence of war and, more broadly, what Dray calls ‘the
structural role of value-judgments in the reconstruction of the past’.52 Dray’s analysis is
important, in my view, quite regardless of what historians and general readers may nowadays
think of Taylor’s book or the controversy it generated long ago.
Most commentators on the origins of the Second World War in Europe would consider
Hitler (and Nazi Germany) as an active subject who subjugated the neighbours through acts of
aggression and therefore, in their judgment, it was Hitler and Nazi Germany that caused the war.
Controversially, Taylor disagreed. According to him, Hitler was ‘manoeuvred, induced, incited,
and even driven to act by events and situations not of his own making’;53 in Germany’s takeover
of Austria, Czechoslovakia, or Poland, Hitler did not ‘initially set out to do what he eventually
did; in all of them, according to Taylor, it was others who placed him in a position where he
finally had to act’.54 The critics, of course, find such an interpretation outrageous and perverse.
But how are we to decide whether someone’s conduct was ‘active’ or ‘passive’? Dray’s
analysis is especially insightful here for it shows, convincingly to my mind, that moral
considerations are integral to assessing an act’s activity or passivity. He expounds:
the question whether or not Hitler was ‘forced’ to act, in the sense at issue in the dispute,
doesn’t concern his psychological powers of resistance, or his degree of bodily control.
Nor is the question whether he was ‘active’ or ‘passive’ the question whether his actions
were intentional or deliberate, and still less whether he performed any actions at all.
What is at issue is the sorts of reasons there were for doing what Hitler did – the degree
of justification he had for claiming that, in view of the situations confronting him, vital
interests were in danger which he therefore ‘had’ to defend. In other words, it is a matter
of the moral nature of the choices that were open to him – so that … behind the judgment
of activity and passivity that lie behind the causal judgments lie value-judgments, indeed
moral judgments, about human life and action. Most of Taylor’s critics simply do not
find it morally plausible to picture von Schuschnigg or Beck as having left Hitler no
reasonable alternative but to invade their countries; or Hitler himself, given the
momentous consequences of his choices of his decisions, as having had no reasonable
alternative but to follow his own timetable. Trevor-Roper, in particular, rejects both
Hitler’s own assessment of what counted as an unreasonable threat to vital interests, and
Taylor’s implied agreement with it. In doing so, he resists also the characterization of
52
53
54
Dray, “A Controversy over Causes,” 71.
Dray, “A Controversy over Causes,” 82-3.
Dray, “A Controversy over Causes,” 83.
17
Hitler as merely responding to the initiatives of others, and hence as being only part of
the process by which, not he, but they, brought on the war. It was Hitler’s opponents,
Trevor-Roper would say, who were put in the position of having to respond. It was Hitler
who, in the relevant sense, provided the ‘active’ element.55
In short, the conflicting causal explanations stemmed from differences in how what the
key actors did was characterized through differing moral stances, Taylor’s depictions, in his
critics’ views, being unreasonably lenient or forgiving towards Hitler and his conduct.
Interestingly, as Dray notes, Taylor believed that in his book he was not making any moral
judgments of his own.56 Taylor wrote: ‘I do not come to history as a judge; and … when I speak
of morality I refer to the moral feelings at the time I am writing about. I make no moral
judgement of my own’.57 But I believe Dray has shown conclusively that this self-understanding
on Taylor’s part is quite erroneous. In fact, without some implicit moral judgments, neither
Taylor nor his critics could have given their respective causal accounts.58
It is important to add here that Dray also discusses an explanation of the origins of the
war offered by F. H. Hinsley.59 Hinsley combines a quasi-deterministic explanation and a
volutaristic explanation, suggesting that up to a point the unbalance between Germany’s natural
weight and the Versailles system had predisposed the country to seek revisionist policies, but
that beyond that point (Munich being the key dividing point) it was Hitler’s conduct that was
crucial in pushing Europe towards the abyss. Such a judgment could not have been made,
according to Dray’s line of reasoning, without an implicit moral judgment on Hinsley’s part that
Hitler’s pre-Munich demands were not unreasonable whereas subsequent demands were
excessive.
Concluding Discussion
In the foregoing section, I showed how historians’ moral judgments connect to their causal
explanations. This happens when historians use Veyne’s triad and address, among other things,
the question of how far a key voluntary act in their causal narratives was active or passive. Their
moral judgments are integral to answering this type of question and are carried over into their
causal explanations when they address it among other questions. That, in short, is my answer to
how moral judgments seep through to causal explanations in history. It may be that there are
other ways but that will need to be demonstrated independently.
The reason why this happens is not that moral judgment is intrinsic to causal explanation,
that the former is a constitutive element of what it is to engage in the act of causal explaining. In
my view, not only is it erroneous to think that causal explanations in history and moral
judgments are two discrete types of activity (so that the latter must not contaminate the former),
but it is also a mistake to consider that the latter is necessarily integral to the former (such that,
crucially, we could not engage in the former without recourse to the latter). Let me amplify.
It will be recalled that ‘explaining’ is a broad range of activity that addresses a
remarkably wide variety of puzzles and curiosities formulated as questions. Explanations, as I
argued earlier, are communicative acts intended to address questions formulated in response to
such puzzles and curiosities – or interests – and therefore, clearly, the substance of explanations
is interest-dependent. Explanations are not disinterested replications of the relevant segments of
55
56
57
58
59
Dray, “Controversy over Causes,” 84-5.
Dray, “Controversy over Causes,” 86-7.
A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 7.
Dray, “Controversy over Causes,” 87.
Dray, “Controversy over Causes,” 91-92.
18
the world as they are or were in themselves but answers to the questions that are asked about the
world because they are of some interest to the enquirers. True, causal explaining in history tends
to take place in accordance with Veyne’s triad, but there are many questions historians, driven by
their interests, may or may not address within this paradigm. Veyne’s triad is a broad framework
which enables many kinds of question to be raised without necessarily dictating any one of them
to be addressed.
Still, I think we can say that historians (and their audience) are very often, if not always,
interested in finding out, among other things, how far a given outcome in history was brought
about by the ‘active’ voluntary acts of certain key human subjects they place at the centre of their
causal narratives – heroically against all odds, deliberately by design, even wilfully and
gratuitously, by misjudgements and ineptitudes, and so forth – and how far the outcome was
shaped by deterministic processes, contingencies, and ‘active’ voluntary acts of certain other key
human subjects, towards which the central figures of the causal narrative responded merely
‘passively’. And if causal explanations they offer aim at least partly at addressing this type of
question, then, as I believe Dray has shown, they have to apply their moral judgments in
answering it, though perhaps unconsciously.
Dray, however, talks of ‘the structural role of value-judgments in the reconstruction of
the past’.60 My contention here is rather that moral judgments play an indispensable role when
we ask certain questions about the past. There is, in my view, no such thing as ‘the
reconstruction of the past’ independently of the questions we find interesting to ask about it – a
point that seems to escape Dray’s attention.
It is commonly acknowledged that the values to which we subscribe and what we say
about the world are interrelated.61 Our values may influence the choice of our subject-matter, the
way we describe what happened, and the questions we select for our investigations. Moreover,
some of our empirical findings will have significant impacts on our beliefs and attitudes,
including our moral ones. But it is often insisted that our investigations should be conducted in a
value-free manner. The intermingling of moral ideas with explanatory efforts is seen therefore to
be undesirable, illicit even.
It may be recalled here that, etymologically, ‘explaining’ had initially to do with an
object unfolding before our eyes to reveal its inside but that it had come to refer more commonly
to our attempt to ‘unfold in words’ what is hidden from us so that we may come to understand
better what was initially obscure. It is not unnatural therefore to suppose that our ‘unfolding in
words’ should replicate the actual unfolding of events as far as evidence permits us to do so and
that we must in particular guard against allowing our moral judgments, external to the unfolding
of events, to colour our explanatory efforts. This was indeed the position that Taylor held, who,
as we saw, was emphatic that he does not bring his own moral judgment to his historical account.
Such a stance has in fact been very commonly espoused by leading professional historians,
Herbert Butterfield amongst them.62
However, to conceive of what goes on, or went on, in the world as unfolding of events is
already to represent it in such a way that, by following the unfolding presented, we can see, or
understand, how the outcome was produced. The world is not divided into ‘events’ before we do
the dividing and the events only appear to ‘unfold’ – that is, in a manner that makes the process
Dray, “A Controversy over Causes,” 71.
For a succinct discussion, see Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the
Contemporary Human Sciences, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1998), 54ff. See also Historians and Social Values, ed.
by Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney.
62
See James Cracraft, “Implicit Morality,” History and Theory 43 (2004), 31-42. See, however, Michael
Bentley, “Herbert Butterfield and the Ethics of Historiography,” History and Theory 44 (2005), 55-71.
60
61
19
appear to ‘explain itself’ – because we carve them out and put them together along a path in such
a way that we can have an understanding of the progression.63
The ‘progression’ may not be smooth as historians may, for example, use the technique
of ‘reality effect’ – giving a detailed account of some features of a scene tangential to the
narrative’s plot – to help reinforce an illusion that the readers are seeing the unfolding of events
before their eyes.64 And to say that historians put their events together ‘along a path in such a
way that we can have an understanding of the progression’ is not at all the same as suggesting
that the progression is ‘linear’ – a term which appears to be used pejoratively. Historians’ causal
narrative are often quite complex, containing many meanderings, a number of paths coming
together to push the narrative in an unpredicted way, and so forth; very many things may need to
happen along the path to smooth the way.65
To talk about historical explanation in this way, incidentally, is not in the least to deny
that things actually happen in the world – people get killed in war just as much as historians
write about them and, crucially, what historians write are constrained by their weighing of
evidence for and against66 – but simply to point out that we cannot represent ‘the unfolding of
events’ independently of our articulation and understanding. In natural science, of course,
scientists may reach a consensus that they have an adequate representation of how a relevant
segment of the world really works, or how it really unfolds, when left to its own devices.67 But
even here it is rightly acknowledged that it is not possible to have direct access to the world to
ascertain what ‘really’ goes on there and decide whether or not a given scientific representation
of it is ‘true’ in the sense of ‘corresponding to it’.68 Moreover, not only might a scientific
consensus break down and come to be superseded, but, outside natural science, a comparable
degree of consensus is relatively rare. There may be a number of reasons for this; the role
historians’ moral judgments play in constructing a certain type of causal narrative is one of them.
But this is not to say that there is something lamentable about this type of narrative – for it is
offered to satisfy our very common curiosities.
It is interesting to note here the legal theorist, Hans Kelsen’s remark that the ancient
Greek word, ‘aition’, which ‘in Demokritos, and elsewhere in the old natural philosophy’ meant
‘cause’ (hence ‘aetiology/aetiology’ or a study of causes), originally signified ‘guilt’.69
See L. O. Mink, “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument,” in The Writing of History, ed. R. H. Canary
and H. Kozicki ( Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 129-49, at 145-47. It is now commonplace in
any case to suggest that “to represent” is not the same as “to replicate.” A painter can make a 2-D representation of
Nelson’s column, but to replicate it, s/he would need to build another – a replica. It is impossible to replicate in
words what went on in the Battle of Trafalgar, though it can be represented. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of
Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976).
64
See Roland Barthes, “Reality Effect,” in French Literary Theory ed. by Tzvetan Todorov, transl. R. Carter
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 11-17.
65
A narrative account offered to explain the process of transition from where the outcome concerned had not
yet occurred to where it has constitutes an “explanation” in the sense and to the extent that the narrative addresses a
series of questions found puzzling and raised in relation to that process. The conventional way in which we explain
an action, that is, in terms of a narrative outlining the context and the actor’s beliefs and desires, often plays an
important part in this overall narrative. However, this is because what actions were taken, and for what reasons, are
two questions frequently asked about how the process smoothed its way towards the outcome. And they are not the
only kinds of question asked. I do not, therefore, agree with David Carr’s long-standing thesis that the explanatory
force of a narrative form of explanation as such derives from its isomorphism with the narrative form we commonly
use to make sense of actions. See David Carr, “Narrative Explanation and its Malcontents.”
66
See Hayden White, “The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Reply to Dirk Moses,” History and
Theory 44 (2005), 333-38, at 337.
67
Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 12, 45, 145-6, 166.
68
Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 249-50.
69
Hans Kelsen, “Causality and Retribution,” in What is Justice? (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971), 303-323, at 314.
63
20
Heidegger, by contrast, suggests that the ancient Greek idea of ‘cause’ had more to do with
‘indebtedness’ than ‘guilt’.70 This view perhaps coheres with Aristotle’s ‘four causes’ better
than does the idea of ‘cause’ as ‘guilt’. Like Kelsen, however, the sociologist, Bruno Latour
points to a parallelism between judicial accusation and scientific attribution of causes.71 Latour
is indebted to the philosopher Michel Serres, for whom ‘science is a branch of the judiciary’; in
the light of etymological linkages he saw between ‘causa’ (‘cause’), ‘chose’ (‘thing’), ‘res’
(‘thing’), and ‘reus’ (‘the accused’), Serres held that what human minds perceive as ‘a thing’ is
that which stands accused of, or is held to be the cause of, something else.72 In this connection,
it may also be recalled that Francis Bacon thought of scientific experimentation on the analogy
of judicial torture – as a method by which nature is forced to speak the truth.73
All these claims tend to suggest that somewhere in our psyche there may well be some
residue or sedimentation of such earlier associations between two kinds of responsibility, causal
and moral. Of course, in our contemporary thought, causal explanations and moral judgments
are no longer intrinsically intertwined. Still, they do appear inseparable in certain historical
narratives – causal narratives focused on the passivity or activity of their central human subjects.
In ending this paper, I wish to add a few further observations to delineate this contention further.
First, it should not be thought that I have been pointing to historians’ biases, implying all
along that they should try to offer more impartial accounts by removing them. James Cracraft
argues that historians ‘should stop denying or downplaying the fact that their discipline is
inescapably a moral one, from the choice of topic to be investigated to the interpretation of the
evidence assembled’ and urges that ‘we [historians] reflect more carefully on the values
informing our work and then clearly articulate, as and when appropriate, a morality adequate to
the tasks we assign ourselves’.74 On this last point, Wolfgang Mommsen firmly believes that
historians must not indulge in a ‘mere reiteration of a given standpoint by historiographical
means’ and that they have a moral responsibility to modify their original perspectives and their
presuppositions if a history they are writing ‘cannot incorporate all the relevant facts and eludes
plausible narration’.75 A search for this kind of ‘reflexive equilibrium’ is commendable.76 Still,
I suspect, the historical profession as a whole may end up reflecting and embodying in its
collective output the range of social values to which the society it forms part of subscribe – so
that, importantly, a conflict of values within a society may well be reproduced in the historical
works emanating from that society. Whether, or how far, this happens in a given society at a
given time is an empirical question; it is not inevitable that it does. But if it does, I do not think
there is anything unnatural or necessarily lamentable about it.
In any case, I do not see that there is anything untoward in historians offering narrative
accounts focused on the passivity or activity of their central human subjects. Indeed, we are
often in search of such accounts. And in supplying such accounts, it seems impossible to do
away with our moral judgments as they are integral to the type of causal narrative which meets
the demand. It is not at all my suggestion that such narratives be rendered ‘value-free’, which
Heidegger, “Technology,” 7-9.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, transl. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1993), 82-5.
72
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 84.
73
C. Merchant, “‘The Violence of Impediments’: Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation,” Isis 99
(2008), 731-60.
74
See Cracraft, “Implicit Morality,” 42.
75
See Wofgang J. Mommsen, “Moral Commitment and Scholarly Detachment: The Social Function of the
Historian,” in Historians and Social Values ed. by Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, 45-55 at 55 and 53.
76
I borrow the term “reflexive equilibrium” from John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972). See also R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, revised ed., with an Introduction by Jan
van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 396ff.
70
71
21
would be tantamount to suggesting that such narratives not be written, which, in turn, would be
absurd.77
Second, it has not been my concern to demonstrate that historians’ moral judgments
enable them to distinguish the more significant from the less important causes, or, as it is
sometimes put, ‘the causes’ from mere ‘conditions’. By what criteria such a distinction may be
drawn is in fact the central concern of Dray’s analysis and so, in this respect, there is a
significant difference between his and mine.78 Rather my argument has been that historians’
moral judgments are integral to causal narratives of activity and passivity – to their
representations of the past that centre on what I called the agent-patient model of human
subjects.
This point is worth stressing for the following reason. It is that, as Dray notes, there is a
tendency to assume that, between the active and the passive elements in a given causal narrative,
it is the former that is to count as the more important cause, or ‘the cause’ as opposed to mere
‘conditions’.79 But if an active action is to be given causal priority over a passive action, and if
one’s judgment concerning activity/passivity is seen to involve one’s moral judgment, then those
who would want historians to offer a more ‘value-free’ account may conceivably argue as
follows: that historians should stop at simply listing those factors which they think contributed to
the outcome concerned and refrain from prioritizing them in terms of their respective causal
weights as this could lead the historians to bring in their moral judgment, thereby making their
accounts more ‘value-laden’ and less ‘impartial’.
But, as I have already pointed out, I do not see anything inappropriate in historians
offering causal narratives to which their moral judgments are integral – though demonstrating
that this is what historians, and others, do some of the time is, in my view, an important exercise
in its own right. And it is their causal narratives of activity and passivity that I have been
concerned with and not the relative causal weights that might be allocated to active and passive
conducts.
Third, I must acknowledge that a number of intriguing questions remain to be asked.
How far does my argument concerning the way historians’ moral judgment seep through to their
causal analysis, which has relied at a key juncture on Dray’s demonstration, extend beyond the
type of case he examined, that is, historians’ differing interpretations about the origins of a given
war? My fairly firm view on this question is that the argument I developed in this article on the
basis of Dray’s study goes beyond the one type of case he dealt with. After all, the
activity/passivity issue is not confined to causal explanations of war’s outbreaks.
But further questions follow: in what ways, if any, do moral judgments of the ‘explainers’
shape their causal explanations of events in society if their causal narratives do not concern the
question of the activity or passivity of particular human subjects central to the narratives? If, for
instance, an explainer gives a causal account of the occurrence of an event, or, more broadly, the
emergence of a particular situation in society, in mechanistic terms, is there a reason to suggest
that the account is ipso facto morally (and in some other value-related ways) neutral? If not,
under what conditions, and why, do moral judgments seep through to such causal accounts? And
what if an explanation offered does not concern the occurrence of one particular event but the
recurrence of an event-type? In such an area of enquiry, explainers are likely to focus on
mechanistic explanations as specific acts of key human subjects and contingencies are unlikely
77
Vann has made a stronger claim to the effect that historians should act as moral commentators and offer
their well-considered moral evaluations of past deeds to their readers’ scrutiny. See Richard T. Vann, “Historians
and Moral Evaluations.” I do not see anything intrinsically illicit in such an activity. What matters is not whether
historians express their moral views but the quality of what they write.
78
Dray, “Controversy over Causes.”
79
Dray, “Controversy over Causes,” 70-71.
22
to contribute to producing a recurrent pattern. In short, how far can the contention of this paper
be extended beyond the type of causal narrative it has focused on?
These questions will be examined in a separate paper, which, as I envisage it, will
analyze the ideological underpinnings of various kinds of causal, and non-causal, narratives.
The kind of narrative I have focused on here – the narrative of activity and passivity – and what I
have somewhat blandly, and without further analysis, referred to as ‘our moral thinking’ may
both stem from liberalism concerned with individual human subjects and their freedom to pursue
what is right or good in their interactions within the existing, and, if possible, reformed and less
constraining, social institutions. If liberalism is at the root of the kind of narrative I have focused
on, it is no surprise that certain key categories of liberal moral thinking seep through to the
causal analysis the narrative embodies.80
To explore this point more systematically, a wide variety of historical narratives, causal
and non-causal at the level of the whole, need to be compared and contrasted. Non-narrative
forms of representation will need to be added to this for further consideration. But to me one
thing is clear: engaging in such a broad topic would still require a meticulous analysis of the
structure of actual explanations – the ways in which relevant segments of the human social world
are rendered more intelligible by the investigators relative to their specific questions – in a
manner exemplified in Dray’s pioneering work over 30 years ago.
But, for now, here is my short conclusion. Causal explanations historians offer are
neither categorically distinct from their moral judgements nor are their moral judgements
necessarily integral to their causal explanations; however, when a historian operates within
Veyne’s triad and investigates the part played by the key actors in terms of the activity or
passivity of their actions, the historian’s moral judgement necessarily finds its way in to the
account given. Causal responsibility and moral responsibility have come to be seen as distinct
concepts and there is no necessary connection between those factors which we consider as
causally responsible, on the one hand, and morally responsible, on the other, for a given
outcome. However, as I hope to have demonstrated, some causal explanations we offer – those
centred on the agent-patient model of the human subjects – are made possible by our moral
judgements. The gulf that lies between those who believe that historians should prevent their
moral judgements from contaminating their causal accounts and those who think otherwise has
been bridged by the observation that some causal explanations are made possible by moral
judgements. The two positions have been reconciled through a detailed analysis of what is
involved in giving a causal account in history.
80
Fasolt, however, points to the fundamentally liberal underpinnings of any modern historiography. See The
Limits of History.