Objectivity in/of Political Philosophy: Normative Stance or Epistemological Desideratum?

Objectivity is a value, that together with other values (such as social relevance, accountability, fairness, openness, morality, etc.) represents key epistemic desiderata of contemporary scientific research. Objective research should depend on the nature of what was studied rather than on the personality, beliefs, and values of the researcher. To this end, methods – defined as a standardized set of procedures for obtaining and interpreting data – play a key role in achieving objectivity since they secure the research process to be replicable and available for assessment by other members of the scientific community. In light of the recent methodological turn in political philosophy and broad development and advance of the methodological apparatus of the discipline, as well as the inclusion of empirical methodology into philosophical research, we have to ask what sort of epistemic capacities individual methods in political philosophy dispose of and how (if at all) they contribute to the production of an objective (or likely objective) knowledge? The proposed paper aims to address this question and provide a classification of conceptions of objectivity that different types of methods used in political philosophy (specifically intuitivist/theoretical and empirical methods) entail. To this end, the paper draws on the three different conceptions of objectivity: objectivity as faithfulness to facts, objectivity as an absence of normative commitments (value-freedom), and objectivity as an absence of personal bias (objectivity as impartiality) and links individual methods with them. Whereas objectivity as faithfulness to facts requires the employment of empirical methodology, the two remaining conceptions are linked with intuitivist methodological accounts relying on the consensual acceptability, shareability, and intersubjectivity of normative statements. I shall argue, that normative theories compounding or relying on empirically testable elements, should prioritize empirical verification over the purely intuitivist methods (such as thought experiments) relying on the idealized models. However, when it comes to the examination of morality and the subsequent formulation of normative principles, the intuitivist methods represent an irreplaceable epistemological role that cannot be substituted by purely empirical approaches (e. g. through survey methodology). To this end, the paper elaborates a set of requirements that increases the reliability of intuitivist methods in political philosophy and accordingly likelihood of reaching objectively valid propositions: (1) Interpersonal employment of methods, (2) Diversity and representativeness of the initial inputs/data (3) Falsifiability criterion (as a defining basis for demarcating boundaries of what questions and domains can be subjected to the method-based process of assessment). Moreover, I shall illustrate that significance of political philosophical findings cannot be evaluated solely based on how methodologically mastered the research was. On the contrary, it is always a value judgment that helps us decide whether any given truth or finding is significant and will be included in a theory. The paper thus argues, that value judgments still need to play a crucial role even in method-based political philosophy since the normative inferences and oughts cannot be solely derived from the (empirical) is.