If physics tempts us to mistake constraint for cause, and biology tempts us to mistake internal necessity for purpose, social explanation tempts us into something more dangerous still: the quiet slide from explanation into justification.
Here, the misread why does not merely confuse categories. It legitimates power.
From Description to Defence
Consider a familiar form of social explanation:
Economic inequality exists because markets reward productivity.
On its surface, this looks structurally similar to the explanations we have already examined. It appears to identify a mechanism internal to a system: given certain institutional arrangements, certain distributions emerge.
But unlike the physical or biological cases, this because is rarely heard as merely explanatory. Almost immediately, it is taken to imply something further:
The explanation becomes a defence — without anyone quite noticing when the transformation occurred.
Social Systems Are Normatively Saturated
The reason this slippage is so easy is that social systems are constitutively normative. They do not merely produce outcomes; they organise permissions, obligations, expectations, and sanctions.
To describe how a social system functions is already to invoke:
rules
roles
rights
responsibilities
These are not neutral facts in the way that conservation laws are neutral facts. They are bound up with legitimacy.
As a result, the why question in social contexts is always unstable. It oscillates between two very different readings:
Why does this outcome occur given this system?
Why is this system in place at all?
Answering the first while smuggling in an answer to the second is one of the most common rhetorical moves in modern public discourse.
The Naturalisation Trick
One especially potent version of this move is the naturalisation of social arrangements.
When we hear explanations like:
Hierarchies exist because humans are competitive.Gender roles exist because of evolutionary pressures.
what is often being done is not empirical clarification but ontological laundering. Contingent social structures are redescribed as inevitable outcomes of human nature, biology, or history.
The effect is to close down the ontological why by pretending it has already been answered.
Why this system?Because that’s just how things are.
This is not explanation. It is foreclosure.
Internal Necessity Revisited — and Abused
It is true that social systems, once established, generate internal necessities. Certain behaviours are rewarded; others are punished. Certain trajectories become statistically dominant.
But the existence of internal necessity tells us only this:
If the system persists, then these outcomes will tend to occur.
It tells us nothing about:
whether the system should persist
who benefits from its persistence
who bears its costs
Treating internal necessity as moral or political warrant is a category error — one with real consequences.
Who Gets to Ask “Why”?
Perhaps the most revealing feature of social whys is that access to them is unevenly distributed.
Those who benefit from existing arrangements tend to ask only internal whys:
Why did this policy produce this outcome?
Those who are disadvantaged tend to ask the external why:
Why are we organised like this at all?
One of the functions of power is to present the first question as the only legitimate one.
The Cost of Confusion
When explanation collapses into justification, critique is reframed as misunderstanding. To question the system is treated as ignorance of how it “really works.”
This is the social analogue of the physicist insisting that dissatisfaction with interpretation is simply a failure to understand the theory — except that here, the stakes are lived.
The misread why becomes a technology of silencing.
Keeping the Questions Apart
The task, then, is not to abandon explanation but to discipline it.
We must be able to say:
This outcome follows from this system
without immediately concluding:
Therefore this system is justified
Holding these apart is not pedantry. It is the minimal condition for ethical and political responsibility.
In the final post of the series, we will step back and ask what all these cases have been circling: what becomes of the why question itself once we stop asking it to do work it cannot do.
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