Making Political Philosophy Public: The Role of Empirical Inquiry

Abstract The drive for greater public engagement and the turn to social science: each is an important and welcome movement in contemporary political philosophy. However, the relationship between these two boundary-crossing endeavors is not simple or obvious. I suggest that political philosophers have sometimes been too quick to assume that empirically-sensitivity and publicness go together; and I identify some ways in which these features can diverge and even compete. More positively, I go on to outline a modestly public role for political philosophy that is facilitated by in-depth engagement with diverse forms of social scientific evidence.