Abstract

This article challenges the widespread view that causal relations are wholly non-normative natural relations. In the case of salient social categories such as race and sex, I argue for a dependency of the causal order of things on the moral and political. At the center of my argument is a puzzle about how audit studies, social scientific experiments that approximate the idealized controlled experiment, work to probe the causal significance of race and sex. Essential to these studies is the distinction between differences that constitute rather than confound an effect of their variable of interest—a distinction, which, I claim, embodies judgments about the sorts of differences that constitute the wrongful causal influence of these categories. If our best scientific practices latch onto genuine features of causation, then normative theorizing’s place in scientific causal theorizing entails that normative facts figure in the causal structure.