One of my points — a pretty obvious one, or so I thought, for anyone who understands the contours of ecclesiastical authority — is that the Church cannot pronounce on the mechanics of the cause-and-effect relationships that exist in the sciences. Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen either make water or they do not. Wages are either increased this way or they are increased that way. These facts may help us form our moral conclusions, but they are, obviously, not themselves subject to moral critique. Something either works a particular way or it doesn’t.
Storck continues to argue that the Church must have the authority in some cases to declare that the sciences are “simply wrong.” Thus if economics says wages rise by doing X, but the statements of prelates seem to imply that they can rise by doing Y, then so much the worse for economics. If we allow the cause-and-effect relationships in economics to exist autonomously (again, he speaks as if cause-and-effect relationships could be subject to moral rebuke!), he demands, then “where does it end?” He says a psychologist could then say that promiscuity leads to human flourishing, and that I would be helpless to object.
I trust my readers have already spotted the fallacy, but just in case: even in this situation the proper objection is not to the cause-and-effect relationships. The psychologist’s research could in fact be unimpeachable: behavior A may well lead to emotional state B. The question is whether emotional state B in fact constitutes human flourishing. This is a philosophical/theological question, not a technical question involving the operation of forces in the natural world, and thus falls well within the province of the Church.
Woods resorts to his understanding of scientific reasoning in order to justify his separation of economics from morality and oversight by the Magisterium. The laws of economics are called laws equivocally -- they are not the same as the "laws" that "govern" the nonrational natural world. Why? Because human behavior, unlike the behavior of subrational creatures, is free and not necessary. Scientists can speak of laws governing the natural world because nonrational natures are determined to their ends, and will behave to attain those ends. What sets human beings apart from other natural creatures is their freedom. Hence, the "laws" posited by economists cannot but be generalizations about human behavior based on assumptions about their desires, and ultimately their moral character, and their constancy of choice -- that is to say that they consistently choose in accordance with their desires and form the respective habits.
Moreover, such generalizations cannot attain the status of certainty, as it is understood within Aristotelian logic (which I take to be a superior account of human reasoning than what passes for philosophy of science these days). This is true not only of human behavior but of any natural creature -- one cannot predict that something will do something with certainty because it is possible that something will intervene to prevent it from happening, and so on. (We can talk about "probable outcomes" in which we exclude the possibility of something happening to prevent those outcomes from occurring.) With human beings the obstacle to an outcome can not only come from without but from within.
It seems that Woods would be incorrect if he were to say that economics is purely a "descriptive" science by his own account. Otherwise, how can he make normative judgments or prescriptions? What hat is he wearing when he makes policy recommendations, or demands that there be non-interference by the government with the market? He is engaged with means-end reasoning, and he believes that the end as specified by the Austrian school is the best or most choice-worthy. But the Church understands that the human good is not merely the accumulation of property or wealth, or even of a diversity of material things. It is proper to the Magisterium to teach about how human goods are to be ordered and attained.
Let us avoid the error of attributing to him an error in understanding the nature economics. If he uses "economics" and "science" in a way that differ from how Catholic theologians and bishops used these words in the past, so be it. But if he denies that the Church or the secular government has the authority or competence to make pronouncements about how agents are to behave in the "marketplace" then he is a dissenter.
(See also this previous post.)
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