Carrol here invokes Elsterian criticisms of functional explanation. I don't think these fly. There is nad functional explanation--the noses-spectacles example. But there is good functional explanation. Racism and capitalism is one.
Carrol (and Elster) are right to insist that we distinguish the precise explananda. With racism, it is the persistence of racism. Racism arises from xenophobia, psychosexual urges, various nonclass tendencies. It persists because capitalism promotes it. Roemer has a fine piece on Divide and Conquer, showing that capitalists derive wage advantages from racist divisions among workers. This takes us back to the question we started wityh from a different angle. If Roemer is right, racism is against the material interests of workers.
Carrol and Elster are right, too, that functional explanations tend to leave out the microexplanation that shows precisely how a functional phenomenon is functional for what it promotes. But that is true of evolutionary explanations too, where the historical microexplanation is often lost forever. Evolutionary explanations--a subset of functional explanations--are nonetheless no worse for taht, as long as we can be confident that there is a microexplanation of the rights ort.
--jks
>
>
>Justin Schwartz wrote:
> >
> >
> > Functionalism is your term, not mine. I think functional explanations
>are
> > legitimate, and historical materialist explanations are broadly
> > functionalist. That is why I think it right to sat that, e,g,, racism is
> > explained in part because it swerves ruling class interests, i.e., is
> > functional for them.
>
>It does serve those interests, but do those interests serve to explain
>_either_ the origins _or_ the perseverance of racism? I don't think so,
>and I would expect that to be the case for most social relations,
>however functional they may be. At most the fact that racism serves
>capitalist interests could explain the resistance of most actual
>capitalists to measures that would reduce racial discrimination. I would
>be happer, however, if even such resistance was explained in more
>systematic terms.
>
>I tend to understand functionalist arguments as being like that 18th
>century suggestion (I don't remember now whether it was serious or in
>jest) that we had noses in order to support spectacles -- i.e. I tend to
>identify functionalist explanations with teleological explanations. They
>tend to identify what needs explanation rather than provide an
>explanation.
>
>Carrol
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