Abstract
Race is frequently treated as an explanatory variable in causal models throughout the social sciences. Yet, there is lively disagreement about the causal status of race. This disagreement arises from three claims that jointly form a paradox: (1) all causes are manipulable; (2) race is a cause; and (3) race is not manipulable. Non-manipulationists resolve this paradox by rejecting (1). On this view, “manipulationism” is too narrow a conception of causation, so we should expand our repertoire of causal concepts such that race, despite being non-manipulable, is nevertheless causal. Causal skeptics about race resolve this paradox by rejecting (2). On this view, race is not a causal variable, in no small part because of its non-manipulability. Finally, manipulationists reject (3), holding that race is causal precisely because it is manipulable. In this paper, we offer a novel position called causal agnosticism about race. Like racial causal skeptics and manipulationists, we hold fast to the claim that all causes are manipulable (1). However, whereas skeptics insist that (2) is false and manipulationists insist that (3) is true, we claim that the social sciences underdetermine the extent to which races are causes or manipulable. We argue for our agnostic position by appeal to the literature on the modeling of causal macrovariables. A causal macro-variable summarizes an underlying finer-structure of a set of microvariables. (For example, a gas’ temperature is a macrovariable with respect to its constituent particles.) If the social sciences provide adequate evidence to accept that race is either a cause or manipulable, then race is either a well-defined macro-variable or there is a “strong signal” for race, where a “strong signal” is a variable distinct from race that nevertheless tracks closely with race. However, no such macro-variables or signals exist in the social scientific models that appeal to race. Furthermore, even if there were a strong signal for race, it does not follow that race is a cause. Consequently, the social sciences fail to provide adequate evidence for the claims that race is a cause and that race is manipulable, i.e., the social sciences underdetermine both (2) and (3). Throughout our discussion, we compare it to the alternatives canvassed above. We conclude by tracing out causal agnosticism’s policy implications. In particular, we argue that any policy intervention suggested by a non-agnostic position about race’s causal status can be reinterpreted in a manner compatible with agnosticism. We conclude from this that the ontological status of race is of marginal policy relevance.
