The Karl Popper quote: ‘Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.’
In: Other
This quote is certainly easier to understand if you include the next sentence.
>Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology. (All that technology may say about ends is whether or not they are compatible with each other or realizable.)
What Popper is saying here is that, like physical engineering, piecemeal social engineering attacks problems to achieve a goal or several goals (“ends”) in a way that must be guided from some other knowledge.
When an engineer designs a system, he does it because somebody told him that they need a system that does particular things. Maybe somebody noticed that transportation would be easier if people did not have to rely on the physical exertion of horses, who need to be fed and watered and rested. So he hires an engineer to design a system of some sort that will move a wagon without needing a horse. And that engineer then builds an engine that is small enough and light enough to be mounted on a wagon and is reliable enough to be used continuously.
What the engineer did not do is decide why it was a good idea to do what he did. He doesn’t know anything about that. He can’t. Not through scientific investigation, anyway. He can design and build and experiment to accomplish a set of goals in a “better” way, but he has to be told what better means. Everything engineers do is an attempt to optimize a design to accomplish some goal with some set of constraints. They don’t pick what the goals are or what the constraints are.
Similarly, piecemeal social engineering involves intervening in society in some way to make something better, according to a set of goals that was not derived from piecemeal social engineering. You can experiment, for example, to see what the most effective way is to reduce teen pregnancy. You can try abstinence-only education. You can try comprehensive sex education including contraception. You can try mandating abortions for teenagers. You *can* answer the question of what the most effective way to reduce teen pregnancy is. What you can’t answer is whether you really should be reducing teen pregnancy in the first place, or what other societal values might make you dismiss some options out of hand regardless of their efficacy.
Latest Answers