Many political philosophers are concerned to look outwards beyond disciplinary boundaries. First, as this special issue highlights, there is a movement to take political philosophy public: to address pressing societal problems; engage directly with nonacademic audiences; and perhaps to effect real political change. Alongside the public turn, there is interest in integrating empirical evidence into our discipline: in using information about how the political world actually functions to inform theorizing about how it ought to be. Interdisciplinary political philosophers are going beyond the mining of social science for illustrative examples and ad hoc data, to seek normative payoffs from their own empirical studies or via extended engagement with secondary data.Footnote 1
Here I offer some brief thoughts about the relationship between these two endeavors to transcend the academic borders of political philosophy. Specifically, I consider whether and how the empirical turn might support political philosophy’s public role. These reflections are prompted in part by my own experiences as a political philosopher who has sought to bridge normative theory and social science (especially survey research) but has failed to “go public” in any significant way. Could my interdisciplinary efforts help me to take meaningful steps into public political philosophy (PPP)? If so, how? Could the turn to social science actually be holding me back?
I argue that, despite their apparent shared quality as correctives to excessive philosophical abstraction and idealization, the empirical and public turns can come apart; and the former may, in certain forms, create barriers to pursuing the latter. More positively, I sketch out two publicly oriented projects—of critical reconstruction and excavation—on which in-depth engagement with social scientific evidence does play a central role. On the former, political theorists work from existing public beliefs, seeking to show how those commitments might lead their adherents to unanticipated, and ethically or democratically preferable, conclusions. On the latter, political theorists draw on empirical evidence to identify publicly salient, but philosophically neglected, phenomena that invite normative attention. These approaches privilege different types of empirical evidence: quantitative data to map the contours of public opinion; and in-depth qualitative evidence to illuminate normatively significant aspects of everyday experience.Footnote 2 But each embodies a modest vision of PPP, whereby the public character of political philosophy resides in the nature and framing of our normative agendas, not necessarily in real-world impact.
First, a few brief remarks on the contested notion of PPP. While PPP takes diverse forms (e.g., roles on ethics committees and commissions; public writing, talks, and media appearances; and policy advisory work), it always involves some concerted commitment to “helping real citizens confront their real challenges.”Footnote 3 It means moving beyond a “trickle-down model” on which, while academic work may sometimes happen to rise to public attention or to impact politics in the long run, it is not the philosopher’s role to pursue or monitor this.Footnote 4 The public political philosopher, in contrast, actively shapes their philosophical work to address issues of societal concern, to reach a nonacademic audience or to exert real-world political influence. Such endeavors invite objections centered on claims to moral expertise. Are political philosophers really moral experts, such that others have good reason to defer to our normative judgments?Footnote 5 Here I remain noncommittal on the debate over substantive moral expertise. Instead, I start from a more ecumenical defence of the public role of political philosophy that highlights the potential for “deliberative empowerment.” Even if political philosophers do not command greater knowledge of the right thing to do, we may (perhaps still in the course of defending our own positions) offer concepts, arguments, and distinctions that help citizens or policymakers to think more deeply for themselves about matters of public concern.Footnote 6
I begin by identifying two ways in which affording social scientific evidence a greater role might make things worse in terms of the public potential of political philosophy. I then develop the positive part of my argument, sketching a set of approaches to integrating normative theory and social science that can facilitate modestly public forms of political philosophy.
1. Why more empirical does not always mean more public
There is an intuitively plausible picture on which the projects of advancing social scientific and public engagement are mutually supportive. In particular, grounding political philosophy more firmly in an appreciation of the empirical realities of politics ought to help combat philosophical tendencies that otherwise create barriers to effective PPP. For example, political philosophers may disregard crucial contextual features of the problems we purport to address; we may have a selective take on the relevant empirical issues; or we may fail to anticipate the likely knock-on effects of our proposed political reforms.Footnote 7 The synergistic model is suggested by several proponents of PPP. For example, Avner de-Shalit traces the public irrelevance of much political philosophy to its failure to engage with political science, suggesting that ‘one important reason why political philosophy ceased to be relevant and to interest the public is … that political philosophy tried to detach itself from the empirical study of politics’.Footnote 8 Jonathan Wolff identifies a “complex information-gathering exercise” as the first step in his model of “engaged philosophy.”Footnote 9 The engaged philosopher works in a bottom-up way, carefully constructing a map of the values at stake in a set of realistic policy options before offering an action-guiding recommendation from within this set.
There is something importantly right about this picture of an affinity between social scientific engagement and (good) PPP. In particular, the pursuit of PPP in the form of policy advisory work is liable to go wrong when we lack detailed understanding of the relevant empirical context. Empirically naive political philosophers are at risk of making infeasible policy recommendations that lack any practical force; or (worse) offering solutions that ignore problems of the second-best and set us back under nonideal conditions. Thus, empirical evidence is crucial if we are to engage seriously with the complex task of developing the “connective tissue between theory and policy.”Footnote 10 While various types of data may be relevant to this policy-oriented version of PPP, evidence about behavioral responses to particular policy innovations is likely to be especially important. To take a simple example, a public political philosopher advising on the case for UBI should do so in light of evidence about the impact of unconditionality on labor market behavior.
However, it is also important to recognize that there are modes of PPP on which the qualities of publicness and empirical-sensitivity can come apart. Consider, for example, practices of “dissemination” and “provocation.” On the former, we seek a wide nonacademic audience for our philosophical work, often through a campaign of media appearances, public lectures, and podcasts. On the latter, we advance controversial and attention-grabbing arguments in the public sphere—defending sports doping or the creation of “designer babies,” for example.Footnote 11 Neither of these public endeavors seems to depend on any special attention to empirical evidence.Footnote 12
Now perhaps we might respond that, partly as a result of a lack of empirical grounding, dissemination and provocation are shallow models of PPP. While they take philosophy out to the public (“they surely would like to engage with the interesting questions asked by the philosopher”), they leave the focus and content of philosophical inquiry essentially untouched by its public purpose.Footnote 13 To borrow some language from Jonathan Floyd, dissemination and provocation involve doing philosophy in public, but not for the public, in the sense of setting out to address people’s live problems.Footnote 14 In response, I think we should not be too quick to dismiss these approaches, if we take seriously the deliberative empowerment aim of PPP. We can pursue this goal by mapping out the values at stake in a live public debate. But deliberative empowerment can also take a more indirect form, involving exposing people to patterns of philosophical reasoning on topics they have not considered before and that might resonate precisely because of their unfamiliar, strange, or counterintuitive nature.Footnote 15 On the latter approach, we are offering up tools of philosophical reasoning—practices of excavating the value dimensions of choices; of distinguishing between and weighing different values; of exposing ambiguities or equivocations and questioning widely held assumptions—that people can take and creatively apply for themselves to matters of personal or political concern.
Conversely, empirical engagement is surely not enough to impart a public character to political philosophy. Consider, for example, recent work in experimental political philosophy that investigates popular responses to philosophical thought experiments.Footnote 16 Despite representing a concerted effort to incorporate evidence about public opinion into political philosophy, experimental political philosophy does not, in itself, embody PPP. It internalizes popular beliefs into academic debate, without either taking the tools of philosophical reasoning out into the public sphere or engaging with pressing societal problems. More generally, to see the empirical and public turns as inextricably linked is perhaps to be too quick to assume that social science is always relevant and public-facing. Empirical scholars too worry about their disciplines becoming detached from real politics and debate the best means of closing the gap!Footnote 17
So, turning to empirical evidence is neither necessary nor sufficient to render political philosophy “public” in a meaningful sense. More than this, there are some respects in which affording a more central role to social scientific evidence might create barriers to PPP. For one thing, it threatens to weaken the distinctive public contribution of political philosophers qua philosophers. I take it that PPP involves political philosophers contributing to public life in our professional capacity (even if we also engage in party politics or activism as citizens). This means both that our professional identity should be clear to any public audiences and interlocutors, and that we should draw on distinctive knowledge, skills, or attributes derived from our philosophical training. As noted above, we can remain agnostic on whether political philosophers are content experts, in the sense of being more likely to be deliver correct moral verdicts. Rather, philosophers can lay claim to a set of “forensic skills” that help us to map the value contours of political issues: “to take the debate apart, to understand the values … that are relevant to the debate, and understand how they figure in arguments for different positions.”Footnote 18 The greater the role for empirical evidence in a given normative inquiry, the more this distinctively philosophical component of PPP is likely to be diluted.Footnote 19
Affording empirical evidence a more central role also threatens to exacerbate the challenge of translating academic research for nonspecialist audiences. Much philosophical terminology will be unfamiliar to nonphilosophers, as will certain complex forms of reasoning. However, when it comes to public communication, we may still have an advantage over some social scientists, especially those who rely on advanced quantitative techniques. In their most general form, our philosophical practices of appealing to intuitions and developing normative arguments appear somewhat continuous with civic discourse.Footnote 20 In contrast, many elements of quantitative political science are wholly unfamiliar to nonspecialist audiences. This creates significant challenges for public dissemination and engagement. Consider, for example, the public afterlife of Nyhan’s original research into the “backfire effect”: the process whereby attempting to correct misinformation may strengthen belief in the misconception. As Nyhan notes, media coverage seized on limited findings of backfire, “distorting its generality and exaggerating its role relative to other factors in explaining the durability of political misperception.”Footnote 21 In this case, distortion occurred in the media reporting of research. But more direct modes of public engagement still leave political scientists treading a difficult line between, on the one hand, failing to make their research genuinely accessible, and, on the other hand, obscuring crucial details of their methods or findings.Footnote 22 Data-sensitive public political philosophers then may face a dual challenge: we must convey often complicated patterns of normative reasoning, as well as making intelligible methodologically sophisticated social science. Also, the challenge is not simply additive, given that the links between empirical and normative components will often be complex.
2. Empirical inquiry and normative agenda setting: A proposal for modestly public political philosophy
These challenges—let us call them the distinctiveness and complexity problems—need not be insurmountable barriers to empirically informed PPP. In particular, even when social scientific evidence plays a significant role in their normative theorizing, perhaps political philosophers need not attempt to present these empirical elements in public. They might instead adopt a division of communicative labor, in which the social science remains “behind the scenes.”Footnote 23 However, this way of sidestepping the distinctiveness and complexity problems calls into question the contribution of empirical evidence to the public turn. If we do not actually use social science in public, how does closer engagement with empirical data enhance the public quality of our work? I now want to address this question by suggesting a mode of PPP that affords empirical inquiry a positive, even essential, role.
2.1. PPP as critical reconstruction: Working from public beliefs
My starting point is an approach to PPP that works from popular beliefs, reasoning normatively from there to reveal unanticipated conclusions. This model has been developed in a variety of ways. Jeffrey Howard argues that an important public contribution of political philosophy involves “bypassing disagreement”: identifying potential convergence on policy positions among citizens who hold divergent principled commitments. For example, following Carens, we might seek to show that egalitarian, libertarian, and utilitarian commitments all support more open borders policies.Footnote 24 On a different variant of this approach, Shmuel Nili has recently defended what he terms “strategic political theory”: a practice of arguing from “bad premises to better policies.”Footnote 25 Specifically, the strategic political theorist starts from indefensible policy choices (e.g., to incentivize massive environmental destruction or to pursue clearly unjust wars) and the unreasonable public commitments that appear to support those choices. They then seek to show adherents of these indefensible positions that their own commitments, properly developed and systematized, imply alternative policy conclusions.
On the models proposed by Howard and Nili, public opinion sets the agenda for a consensus seeking—or at least gap-closing—model of PPP. This endeavor can be valuable for individual citizens in thinking through the implications of their commitments; and for democracy as a whole, insofar as we can deliver on the promise of revealing pathways to agreement. Thus, these approaches are meaningfully public in how they engage public opinion, in a way that I suggested experimental political philosophy (at least by itself) is not. They work from popular views not in order to investigate what the wider public think about a philosophically defined puzzle, but rather to fulfil a public purpose.
However, to deliver on this promise, political philosophers must engage with empirical evidence that helps to characterize the public views that constitute our taking off points. This is crucial to ward off the danger that we simply imagine lines of philosophical contestation replicated among the wider public: assuming that the task of reconciling opposing publics is the same as that of revealing an overlapping consensus between competing philosophical theories.Footnote 26 Howard, for example, moves quickly between examples of incompletely theorized agreements among ethical principles and “possible bases of agreement among citizens.”Footnote 27 For instance, he notes that a citizen who “views execution as incompatible with the dictates of the communicative theory of punishment” might converge with another who deems the death penalty as overly harsh on retributive grounds.Footnote 28 Are there retributivists and communicative theorists out there among the general public? To what extent do citizens hold consistently to any theory of punishment? These are empirical questions that require careful investigation.
To be clear, my suggestion here is not that the public lack strong normative convictions about political questions such as border control and punishment. It is rather that we should not be too quick to assume that these views are consistently structured along the lines of competing philosophical theories. Instead, we need carefully to reconstruct the real starting points of actual citizens. Earlier I suggested that political philosophers are experts in delineating the values at stake in competing policy choices. But we need political science when it comes to mapping out the contours of prevailing public opinion. In particular, fulfilling the promise of projects of critical reconstruction is likely to require in-depth engagement with large-scale survey data.
2.2. PPP as excavation: Uncovering publicly salient normative agendas
I have sketched an approach on which political philosophy serves the public through reconstructive normative projects that start with existing popular commitments. I think we can usefully expand this account, to think more generally about a mode of PPP that is centered on the publicness of the agendas of political philosophy. This can, but need not, mean working from the substantive content of public opinion; it can also involve taking publicly significant questions or issues as the focal point of our normative inquiry. Social science also plays an important role in the pursuit of this broader vision of PPP. But, while the reconstructive strategies envisioned by Howard and Nili privilege quantitative data about public opinion, the process of uncovering publicly salient normative phenomena will often be aided by in-depth qualitative information.Footnote 29 This agenda-setting approach to leveraging qualitative evidence is embodied, for example, in Jane Mansbridge’s work, such as her theory of equal power that grew out of in-depth interviews she conducted with members of a counselling organization.Footnote 30 More recently, the idea that social scientific inquiry might help to orient philosophers toward politically salient phenomena has been captured in the language of “grounded normative theory” (GNT): a mode of empirically informed political theory “marked by shared commitments to incorporating original empirical data or analysis in a recursive process of theory development striving for accountability to persons in empirical contexts.”Footnote 31 It is the commitment to recursiveness and accountability—to reshaping normative theory through ongoing dialog with actors in specific contexts—that marks GNT out from other forms of data-sensitive political philosophy. Consider, in contrast, interdisciplinary projects that leverage empirical evidence in order to test philosophers’ background empirical assumptions, without questioning the extant terms of philosophical debate.Footnote 32
The principles of GNT resonate closely with the practice of “field philosophy.”Footnote 33 Field philosophers collaborate with practitioners in a specific domain over an extended period to co-define a normative agenda and articulate potential solutions. For example, an environmental philosopher might work with land managers to define priorities for wildlife preservation.Footnote 34 Field philosophy emphasizes the reframing of our philosophical agendas through this extended interaction with stakeholders: field philosophers come to “approach social, technical, and policy problems from the perspective of their collaborators, rather than starting with a framework that has been hammered out in the philosophical literature.”Footnote 35 In this mode, PPP stands in contrast to internal-facing academic inquiry that begins and ends with claims directed by philosophers exclusively toward other philosophers.Footnote 36
I have suggested that we can imbue political philosophy with a public quality by starting “with questions that the public raises and is bothered by.”Footnote 37 This can, as in field philosophy, involve face-to-face interaction with activists or professionals, to direct philosophical inquiry toward problems they encounter on the ground.Footnote 38 But there are also more indirect ways of deriving publicly salient normative agendas from social science, by investigating secondary data that reveals morally salient phenomena or puzzles in people’s everyday lives. It is in this very modest sense that I can perhaps trace a public quality in my recent work on risk and family relationships.Footnote 39 This research emerged, in part, from my exploration of the sociological literature on defensive ethnic-racial socialization practices in minority families: the strategies that parents use to prepare their children for, and protect them against, threats of racism. This includes making strategic choices about schooling, housing, extra-curricular or social activities; warning children about racial discrimination or teaching them how to behave to protect themselves (e.g., if stopped by the police); and inculcating a protective sense of cultural belonging and pride.
Family sociologists have developed a rich picture of the nature, character, and effects of these practices.Footnote 40 I found that qualitative research reveals a dual character to how parents view and experience defensive racial socialization. On the one hand, these practices are regarded as valuable cultural traditions and as necessary to enable children to thrive. On the other hand, parents sometimes highlight the burden of persistently working to protect their children, or express worries about how certain practices intrude on childhood freedom.Footnote 41 Here I turned to recent philosophical work on the family to try to develop a diagnosis of these parental concerns. Specifically, I think we can usefully view the dynamics of defensive racial socialization through the lens of Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift’s “familial relationship goods” framework. Brighouse and Swift argue that there are distinctive goods, for both children and adults, that are uniquely realized through the parent–child relationship: an intimate but authoritative relationship in which children are raised by a small number of adults.Footnote 42 The imperative to protect children against threats of discrimination, I argued, raises unfair barriers to the enjoyment of some of these goods of parent–child relationships, including spontaneity and opportunities to share in the intrinsic goods of childhood.Footnote 43
Contemporary philosophers of the family have given little attention to the role of racism in shaping family life. Thus exploring the empirical literature on ethnic-racial socialization helps to highlight and to frame a new agenda for normative work on the family. There is an affinity between my experience of moving between empirical and normative work on the family and Thacher’s wider account of the “normative case study.” Thacher argues that qualitative cases can play an important role in crystallizing previously unnoticed (or only dimly perceived) values.Footnote 44 Crucially, he argues, the role of empirical evidence is not limited to identifying means to already recognized ends. Unfamiliar cases can also generate “creative tension” with our existing beliefs and thereby stimulate new lines of normative reasoning.Footnote 45
This approach is less directly public than the field philosophy and GNT models, as it does not involve addressing questions elicited through conversation with practitioners or stakeholders on the ground. However, by engaging in-depth with empirical research that exposes sometimes hidden dimensions of people’s everyday experiences, we may, in turn, generate publicly salient philosophical agendas. The sense that I had “gone public” in some limited way in my research on the family arose in part through my experiences teaching this work as part of an undergraduate course on the ethics and politics of risk. More than some other topics (e.g., self-driving cars and geoengineering!), this work seemed to resonate with students. Some expressed that it offered a new perspective on phenomena they had thought about or encountered. Others noted that they had not previously considered how some people are persistently working to ward off threats of racism, but this observation would stay with them. Some students took the broader idea—that injustice that can arise through the pre-emptive steps that vulnerable individuals take to protect themselves in the face of risk—and applied this framework to other issues in their written work.
3. Conclusion
This paper has offered some reflections on the relationship between two important endeavors in contemporary political philosophy. I began by problematizing the connection between the projects of empirical- and public-engagement. We should not be too quick, I suggested, to assume that the former is always necessary, or even helpful, in pursuing the latter. More positively, I have put forward a vision of PPP—centered on the public character of our normative agendas—in which diverse forms of empirical evidence play a central role.
PPP, in its most prominent forms, involves contributions to notable committees or commissions, high-profile media appearances, and political advisory roles. However, these activities are naturally limited to a relatively small number of philosophers with a particular set of skills. In-depth engagement with social science may help more of us to make more routine contributions to PPP, through practices of critical reconstruction and the unearthing of novel normative agendas.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: A.B.
Conflicts of interests
The author declares none.
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