Experimental Political Philosophy as a Bridge between Theory and Practice

Although experimental work is now well established in both political science and moral philosophy, there has been little so far in the way of experimental political philosophy, despite a few early or partial exceptions (Floyd, 2017; Chapman, 2023; Lindauer, 2023; Miller, forthcoming). This might be for good reason, given how most so-called ‘experiments’ focus on what people would do under various conditions, whilst political philosophers, by contrast, focus on what we should do. How though does that distinction square with long-standing traditions regarding the use of ‘intuitions’ and ‘judgements’ as evidence for and against particular principles, or indeed the way so-called ‘thought experiments’ are applied to normative issues by both moral and political philosophers alike? Perhaps instead we should think of both armchair exercises, such as ‘trolley dilemmas’ and the ‘original position’, and real world policy experiments, such as Universal Basic Income (UBI) trials, as at least potentially equivalent evidence when it comes to assessing the core principles involved. That though creates an intriguing possibility in between: a third kind of experimental work that involves, on the one hand, ‘real’ people organized under varying political ‘rules’, but also, on the other, the kind of ‘laboratory’ conditions familiar in other fields. This would be vital ‘bridging’ work, enabling not just the testing of principles under meaningful conditions, but also the kind of variable-controls needed for both clarity and safety regarding consequences. We would thus be exploring ‘radical’ ideas in ‘practical’ settings in a way that mitigated against both pessimism, on the part of philosophers, and panic, on the part of politicians.