Experiments as a Resource for Political Philosophy

This paper examines the justificatory role that laboratory-type experiments can play in political philosophy. Many such experiments have now been conducted with the aim of discovering how ordinary folk think and behave when confronted by questions of the kind that concern political philosophers, about justice and so forth. In the first part of the paper, I introduce several such experiments, dividing them into ‘conceptual thought experiments’ which aim to trace how people use concepts such as intention and responsibility, ‘normative thought experiments’ which aim to unearth the principles that people apply when asked to make judgements about some distributive outcome, or state of the world, and ‘stimulus experiments’ which explore how differing forms of prior treatment influence what people will do or say – for example how being exposed to national symbols affects their willingness to trust and help others. After having discussed what political philosophers can hope to learn from each of these types of experiment, I then in the second part of the paper explore three critiques – three reasons for doubting their value. The first targets the narrowness of the subject pool that’s normally used – highly educated students in the global North. The second asks whether the kind of data that these experiments produce is the right kind of data for purposes of political philosophy. The third examines the problem of disagreement – the fact that in many cases subjects disagree among themselves about the answer to the question that’s been posed or the decision they have to make. If the aim of conducting experiments is to resolve disagreement within political philosophy, how much is gained by feeding in evidence about what people think or how they behave that also reveals significant disagreement? Responding to these critiques raises questions about the aim of political philosophy itself – for example how far it aspires to make claims that everyone everywhere ought to accept, or conversely how far it can afford to recognize that its reach is limited in both time and space