Inama-Sternegg’s 1884 essay is a methodological critique of moral statistics, focused above all on A. von Öttingen’s influential attempt to use statistical regularities in support of a Christian-social ethics. He opens by situating the field historically, not as an ancient science of morality but as a modern statistical designation attached to morally significant social facts.
Bekanntlich wird von „Moralstatistik“ gesprochen, seit Guerry im Jahre 1833 für eine Reihe statistischer Untersuchungen, die sich gleichmäßig auf sittlich bedeutende Lebensäußerungen des französischen Volkes bezogen, diese zusammenfassende Bezeichnung erfand.
English translation: As is well known, one has spoken of "moral statistics" ever since Guerry, in 1833, invented this comprehensive designation for a series of statistical investigations which uniformly related to morally significant expressions of life of the French people.
The essay’s central concern is the boundary between empirical statistics and speculative interpretation. Inama-Sternegg does not deny that moral-statistical data can illuminate ethical life; rather, he argues that such data must first be handled as historically conditioned social facts. His target is the premature transformation of observed regularities into moral laws already shaped by theological, metaphysical, or naturalistic assumptions.
Die unfertige, Schritt für Schritt ihrem Ziele sich nähernde Forschung überläßt man nur zu gerne sich selbst, will nicht Teil haben an den mühevollen Versuchen, an den tausendfältigen Berichtigungen und Irrtümern, welche der Forschung nirgends erspart bleiben.
English translation: Unfinished research, approaching its goal step by step, is only too readily left to itself; one does not wish to take part in the laborious attempts, in the thousandfold corrections and errors that research is spared nowhere.
Against Öttingen, he accepts that no investigator approaches moral statistics without presuppositions, but he insists that presuppositions must not be smuggled into the proof as though they were statistical results. Worldview may orient inquiry; it may not predetermine what the data are allowed to show. This is why he distinguishes sharply between Öttingen’s valuable collection of material and the social-ethical laws derived from it.
Die sozialethischen Gesetze Öttingens aber sind keine Resultate der Forschung — der Moralstatistik.
English translation: But Oettingen's socio-ethical laws are not results of research—of moral statistics.
The most sustained methodological criticism concerns comparison. Inama-Sternegg warns that international tables often juxtapose phenomena that are not truly comparable: crimes defined differently, marriages and divorces governed by different legal regimes, illegitimacy shaped by local custom, and administrative statistics produced by divergent bureaucratic practices. Large numbers do not by themselves overcome such heterogeneity. On the contrary, grand averages can conceal the concrete conditions that alone make a moral fact intelligible.
His preferred alternative is historical and contextual analysis. Moral statistics should begin with the life of a people, its institutions, legal order, economic circumstances, religious forms, and inherited habits. Ethical meaning emerges from causal setting and social function, not from an abstract classification imposed before inquiry begins. For that reason, he resists both theological over-systematization and naturalistic reduction: neither Christian ethics nor a deterministic sociology may claim statistical confirmation before the facts have been critically established.
Der ehrliche Forscher verzichtet von vornherein darauf, aus der bloß äußeren Erfahrung die sittlichen Prinzipien, die die Welt erhalten, abzuleiten.
English translation: The honest investigator renounces from the outset any attempt to derive from mere external experience the moral principles that sustain the world.
The essay closes by redefining the status of moral statistics. It is not an autonomous discipline with special laws of its own, but a perspective within general statistics, drawing on all statistical domains insofar as they reveal the moral condition and movement of society.
Die Moralstatistik ist keine besondere, selbstständig zu behandelnde Disziplin der allgemeinen Statistik; alle Gebiete der Statistik tragen zur Erkenntnis des sittlichen Zustands und der sittlichen Bewegungstendenzen des Volkes, der Gesellschaft, bei.
English translation: Moral statistics is not a distinct, independently treatable discipline of general statistics; all fields of statistics contribute to the knowledge of the moral condition and the moral tendencies of movement of the people, of society.
Inama-Sternegg therefore preserves moral statistics while restricting its claims. Its task is not to prove morality from numbers, nor to validate a prior doctrine, but to contribute cautiously to historically grounded social knowledge. The essay’s lasting significance lies in its critique of decontextualized averages, its suspicion of premature laws, and its demand that moral interpretation remain answerable to carefully analyzed empirical reality.
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