How to do (public) political philosophy: From pupils to professors

Political philosophy's primary focus is not how politics is organised right now, or how it has been organised in the past, but rather how it should be organised in the future. This gives our subject a fairly clear remit, but also a fairly substantial puzzle. What on earth could make our arguments in this heated area right or wrong, or at least better or worse? Clearly, as in all fields, considerations such as consistency, clarity, and comprehensiveness go a long way, but they cannot be the whole story. What we need to know is: What are the more specific forms of reasoning that would make our arguments in this domain more or less defensible? Or, put differently, precisely which methods of argument are best suited to supporting the sorts of conclusions we want to draw?

With that question in mind, this project has two objectives. First: to establish the study of 'methods' in political philosophy. This will be pursued with our subject's first book on the topic, an under-contract monograph with Oxford University Press entitled Political Philosophy: Problems and Methods. Second: to increase engagement with our subject amongst the wider public, starting with the city of Bristol. This will be pursued by giving talks, at every secondary school in Bristol, on 'how to do political philosophy'. These talks will provide an exciting and accessible account of the forms of argument available to these students, as documented in the planned book.

The benefits of this work are substantial and connected. In the first instance, it will improve the current academic situation, whereby we have various high profile 'methodological' debates, including 'ideal vs. nonideal theory' and 'moralism vs. realism', but no debates about particular 'methods', let alone a keystone text of the kind planned here. Instead, our current discussions are primarily a set of exchanges about the wider purposes of our subject, rather than a set of debates about the general forms of reasoning - from thought experiments to conceptual analysis - that enable us to pursue those purposes. As a result, we do not really know how many methods political philosophy has, what those methods are, what their merits might be, or how much they vary from methods found elsewhere - in political science, for example, or moral philosophy, or the daily arguments of 'real politics'. All these questions matter. By exploring them, this project will open up a new field of enquiry, help scholars with their current work, and also make our subject more accessible to the general public, given that our methods of argument need first to be clearly understood before they can be clearly explained.

This last benefit illustrates the bridge between the two objectives, and it is worth emphasising here, given that, at present, political philosophy is unsure about how best to engage with the 'real world', whilst the real world is unsure even what political philosophy is, assuming it has heard of it at all. This uncertainty matters, because it shows how answering what might seem like rather dry 'methods' questions within our subject would have significant implications for our relationship with the world outside it. In other words, if we could do a better job of explaining what we do and how we do it, the relationship between academic scholarship and the general public could be transformed. Increased understanding of our subject would lead to increased accessibility, increased interest, and increased potential for non-philosophers to 'do' it themselves. Public philosophical engagements would become, not just more productive, but also more common, whether they take the form of policy papers, comment pieces, or even talks in schools of the kind proposed here. This project therefore studies methods not just for the sake of the study of methods, but also in order to change how our subject is done, and in turn how it is seen and accessed by others.