Poverty in North Korea (2010) 

                                (credit: Roman Harak, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 3.                               (continued) 

In answer to the critics who deride the difficulty of rigorously testing Moral Realism, we can also reply that studies called ex post facto can be done in Social Science. Anthropologists and historians can study existing societies, each as it currently is and compare it to earlier versions of itself or to other societies with similar traits. From these observations, scientists can form hypotheses about how beliefs/morés/customs – once they enter into the culture of a tribe – connect to outcomes further along in time for that tribe. In ex post facto studies, again, the scientists do not intervene in the flows of life of that tribe, no matter how well or badly they seem to be trending. The scientists only watch to see whether the outcomes that they predicted for the tribe do, in fact, occur. Then, they can use the findings of their research to advise governments on policy.  

In ex post facto studies, social scientists ask questions like: Does losing a war spur economic growth in a defeated nation? Do levels of interracial strife rise during economic depressions? Can a country learn a market-based system of commerce in a generation or less? Does a tribe’s losing its traditional source of livelihood, and thus many of its traditional values and customs, cause the tribe’s incidence of substance abuse and family violence to go up? Etc.  

Then, the scientists can draw tentative conclusions about how all societies move and evolve over time. These kinds of conclusions are tentative, because the experimental conditions and the ethics of science do not allow the scientists to isolate the test population or the control. The kind of rigor that bacteriologists, for example, can get in studying a drug can’t be matched by anthropologists. We can’t rigorously control the lives of real people, first because it’s wrong, in our view, to do so, and second, because, almost always, they won’t stand for it. Such action, even roughly perceived, causes people to revolt.

But the fascinating thing for social scientists is that conclusions drawn from ex post facto studies can still be tested in the real world. For example, many of the countries of Eastern Europe got free market economies within a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in many of them, levels of prosperity soared in less than twenty years.

Modern history has even provided more dramatic examples of the greater efficiency of free market economies compared to centrally planned ones. In one generation, South Korea, using the free market approach to commerce, left totalitarian North Korea far behind. Germany today is no longer divided into West and East, but for many years, it was. West Germany soared while the East, under Soviet control, withered. Ethnically, historically, the same people. One group under the free market system, the other under the centrally planned one. In the realm of ex post facto study, proof of the superior efficiency of the free market system could not have been more dramatically demonstrated: Communism lost.

Similar studies to that done of East and West Germany and North and South Korea are being done, especially by historians, all the time. More and more, they keep demonstrating the value of freedom over the long haul.

In the meantime, what progress are we making toward articulating a universal moral code? The signs are mixed. Arguably, the field with the scientists who are most intent on finding nomothetic laws that apply to human history is the wing of Anthropology called “Cultural Materialism". A rigorous scientific gaze has been turned onto culture only recently by these few people. What might we achieve if we began to fully fund truly scientific study of ourselves? 

                                          abandoned factory in East Berlin 

                                      (credit: Babewyn, via Wikimedia Commons)