This is a single methodological journal article. Its scope is disciplinary: Inama-Sternegg revisits his earlier critique of Oettingen after Georg v. Mayr’s renewed defense of a separate “Moralstatistik.” He does not deny the value of monographs on suicide, illegitimacy, divorce, prostitution, poverty, or crime; his thesis is that such phenomena must be studied within the ordinary system of social statistics, not detached as a morally defined science. He stresses that Mayr is no naïve moral statistician:
Der statistische Kritizismus, den ich gegen die ältere Moralstatistik aufrief, beherrscht auch ihn wie überhaupt die moderne Wissenschaft.
English translation: The statistical criticism which I invoked against the older moral statistics governs him too, as it does modern science in general.
The disagreement is therefore not over whether statistics may illuminate social ethics, but whether moral categories may organize statistical science. Inama-Sternegg’s central worry is that a separate moral statistics would select facts by prior valuation, detach them from their institutional contexts, and force heterogeneous materials into an artificial moral scheme.
His first conceptual move is to attack the criteria by which such a field would be delimited. “Normal” morality varies across times, places, confessions, and legal orders; “typical” facts obscure rather than clarify the analytic decomposition of social masses. Symptomatology is even weaker, because an alleged indicator is not yet evidence of a moral condition.
Zunächst sind Symptome nur Hypothesen, nicht Tatsachen.
English translation: To begin with, symptoms are only hypotheses, not facts.
Thus alcohol consumption, remarriage, poverty, suicide, or illegitimacy may suggest questions, but they do not by themselves prove moral states. The same limitation governs motive statistics: official classifications often leave causes “unknown” or “undetermined,” and the inner motives of crime, suicide, or family conduct cannot be reconstructed as mass facts with sufficient reliability. The article’s governing epistemic boundary is stated sharply:
Mit der Klarlegung der inneren Struktur der sozialen Massen und ihrer Zusammenhänge ist die Aufgabe der Statistik erschöpft; inwieweit diese Massen für den Sittenzustand der Bevölkerung bedeutsam sind, kann bei besonders günstiger Lagerung des Materials abgeleitet, darf aber nie postuliert werden.
English translation: With the elucidation of the internal structure of social masses and their interconnections the task of statistics is exhausted; the extent to which these masses are significant for the moral condition of the population may, under especially favorable arrangements of the material, be inferred, but must never be postulated.
The constructive half of the essay reorganizes Mayr’s proposed moral-statistical materials. Inama-Sternegg accepts the distinction between theoretical and practical statistics, but proposes a “special social statistics” of fundamental institutions: marriage and family, spatial associations, confession, nationality, estate, class, and occupation. This allows ethically important facts to remain attached to the social forms that make them intelligible.
Die fundamentalste gesellschaftliche Institution, zugleich von allgemeiner Bedeutung für den gesamten Aufbau und das gesamte Leben der Gesellschaft ist die Ehe und die durch sie begründete Familie.
English translation: The most fundamental social institution, at once of general importance for the entire structure and life of society, is marriage and the family founded upon it.
Divorce, adultery, illegitimate birth, celibacy, mixed marriage, and fertility are therefore not free-floating moral signs. Divorce is a pathology of marriage, but its meaning depends on law, confession, and motive; adultery would be morally precise if fully known, but criminal statistics capture only a fragment; illegitimacy varies according to concubinage, service and labor conditions, and later legitimation; celibacy cannot be divided statistically into those who will not marry and those who cannot. Hence his objection to extracting only “deviations” for a moral-statistical chapter:
Eine Loslösung gerade der offensichtlichen Krankheitserscheinungen und eine Zuweisung derselben zu einem besonderen Teilgebiete „der Moralstatistik“ ist daher wissenschaftlich nicht gerechtfertigt, da dadurch innerlich Zusammengehöriges getrennt und die Gefahr erzeugt wird, daß gerade die wichtigsten Institutionen der Ehe und Familie unter dem sozialethischen Gesichtspunkt gar nicht oder nicht genügend gewürdigt werden.
English translation: A detachment of precisely the manifest pathological phenomena and their assignment to a special subfield of "moral statistics" is therefore not scientifically justified, since thereby what inwardly belongs together is separated and the danger arises that precisely the most important institutions of marriage and the family are not appreciated at all, or not sufficiently, from the social-ethical point of view.
The same logic governs the later examples. Prostitution and suicide may stand near criminal statistics because police recording and public order connect them with criminalistic materials, yet both remain uncertain in registration and moral interpretation. Poverty belongs more coherently with occupational and class statistics, as a form of declassification, while poor relief belongs to political and administrative statistics.
Inama-Sternegg’s conclusion is deliberately modest about taxonomy but severe about method:
Ich insistiere im einzelnen nicht darauf; denn ich halte den Streit um Systeme überhaupt für unwesentlich und gegenüber dem wissenschaftlichen Inhalte derselben sogar für ziemlich äußerlich.
English translation: I do not insist on this in detail; for I regard disputes over systems as unessential in general, and, as compared with the scientific content of those systems, as fairly external.
The essay’s lasting relevance lies in this methodological discipline: social facts may have ethical significance, but statistics must not transform indicators, correlations, administrative records, or inferred motives into direct measurements of a people’s morality.
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