Colloquium with Dr. Marina DiMarco
Explanation Laundering - A Philosophy Colloquium with Dr. Marina DiMarco
Friday, October 11, 2024 | 1:30 to 3:30 PM
Lovejoy Library 3rd Floor Conference Room (LL 3201)
Given increasing recognition of the relationships between inequality and health, many scientists are optimistic about integrating social and biological explanations to understand how social causes produce health outcomes. However, critical scholars Dorothy Roberts and Natali Valdez have each shown that social causes often “disappear” from the resulting integrated explanations. This disappearance, they argue, maintains a status quo, targeting individual responsibility and interventions for health. Since social causes are often explicitly acknowledged in these research projects, this disappearance is a puzzle: how can we obfuscate a cause that is included in an explanation?
One way we can do this is via a phenomenon I call explanation laundering. I adapt explanation laundering from Alan Rubel, Clinton Castro, and Adam Pham’s concept of agency laundering, which happens when agents obscure their moral responsibility for an outcome by mixing their own actions with other causes of an event. Likewise, explanation laundering happens when agents obfuscate patterns of causal responsibility in virtue of how they combine and describe causal variables. I sketch a few ways explanation laundering might happen in biosocial science, including failures of proportionality (as theorized by Jim Woodward and David Kinney) and phenomenon choice (as theorized by Sean Valles). The notion of explanation laundering may help us understand how social causes disappear from explanations that nonetheless include them.
