What If? The Historian and the Counterfactual

This essay lays out why many scholars, particularly historians, are inherently skeptical of counterfactuals. It highlights several of the most obvious errors that are often made by those undertaking counterfactual reasoning. It also highlights how these articles go a long way toward developing effective rules for the appropriate and most effective use of counterfactuals.     

Free to choose,free to win,free to lose: the phenomenology of ethical space

This paper argues that, contrary to some points of view, most public administrators have sufficient discretion to act ethically; they have ‘ethical space’ within field constraints. This conclusion is arrived at by way of a theoretical perspective called phenomenology. Along the way we describe this orientation and try to show its relevance to practitioners.