I think the real source of philosophical unease at comparing death rates between heads of state and timber cutters as if it were an apples-to-apples basis[12] is not the small sample in and of itself, but the difference between a historical and a statistical mode of thinking. We’re tempted to think of the deaths of Popes, Presidents and kings as unique historical events, each with an individual set of causes. We know about them through their individual details, and in many cases we speculate and investigate to get a fuller picture of how they came about, whether we’re looking at the minutiae of the Texas Book Depository, or the grand sweep of the Hundred Years’ War.
The occupational deaths of fishermen and lumberjacks, on the other hand, for the most part appear to us mediated through lists of statistics[13], as risks which are part of the job. And in these occupations particularly, because the main sources of risk are such things as the pattern of storms and the direction of a falling tree, it’s even easier to fall into thinking of them in the whole, as stochastic processes, with the individual outcomes as the natural results of a stable distribution.
The best method, here and elsewhere, is to hold both thoughts in one's head at the same time, to think statistically and historically. One of my proposals for APSA this year concerns Grotius and the means by which we make or verify claims about how the moral world is structured: what counts as evidence, or argument, or anything else. The key to his approach and, I would argue, ours as well, is to be conversant in all these approaches and be able to apply them when necessary, and use each to check the excesses of the others. Doing this is hard but necessary, if one's concern is to arrive at what is true.
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