The Explanatory Power(s) of Unintended Consequences (original) (raw)

Commentators on invisible-hand explanations often stress their distinctive explanatory virtue. They claim that one provides a greater insight about the nature of a certain social outcome when one supposes that those who contribute to that outcome do not intend it. But commentators also tend to avoid offering a precise account of the nature of the related explanatory gain. An explication is missing, and it is the goal of the present chapter to supply it. Because the notion of unintended consequences is highly ambiguous, its multiple (often conflated and tacit) meanings are preliminarily distinguished. The chapter then critically reconstructs several arguments in support of the explanatory power of unintended consequences thus disambiguated. It finally points to another understanding of the merit of unintended consequences: the point of re-describing an intended social outcome as an unintended one, I submit, is to acknowledge those social aspects that exist independently from what we or some legal authority, decide, accept or believe to be the case.