Building Bridges. Towards a Minimal Methodological Consensus in Political Philosophy

The main objective of political philosophy is to hold intelligent debates about what constitutes a “good order” for human beings. But it is not seldom that discussions like these are made particularly difficult by fundamental epistemological and methodological disputes as the following: Can complex social phenomena be best understood by studying micro-level processes or does this approach fail to grasp the more important emergent properties ('micro-macro debate')? Should political philosophy focus on cultural factors; or is social reality mainly a function of human nature ('nature-nurture debate')? Is it even possible to formulate true statements about the structure of an objective social reality in the first place; or are truth, knowledge and maybe even reality itself mere social constructions ('realism-relativism debate')? In each of these cases, both sides refer to important argumentative contexts to be considered. But until now, a lack of plausible meta-perspectives on these disputes hampers the potential of political philosophy as a discipline that is both critical and of practical relevance. The goal of this article is to provide consistent answers on these questions that go beyond traditional dichotomies by drawing on insights from complexity theory and evolutionary anthropology. With regard to the antagonism of realism vs. relativism, the solution lies in a modest realism that is informed both by social constructivism and evolutionarily epistemology. The micro-macro dualism can be overcome by acknowledging the emergent properties of complex social systems as well as their sensitive dependence on initial conditions, i.e. the characteristics of human beings as the individual components of complex societies. Finally, the nature-nurture antagonism is simply an operationalization of the aforementioned dualisms and therefore a category mistake about the nature of social reality. It can be avoided by a classical method of political philosophy that has gone slightly out of fashion in the past decades: the micro-foundation of normative theories in the vastly growing empirical knowledge about the evolved human nature as a cultural being. Taken together, these insights have the potential to serve as a minimal methodological consensus for political philosophy in particular as well as for political science in general. On the one hand, this minimal consensus provides a meta-theoretical framework that is both logically consistent and empirically robust. On the other hand, it allows for and encourages a constructive division of labor between a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. This minimal consensus can eventually help political philosophy to regain importance by performing better in fulfilling its societal function: helping to understand the world and to pursue reasonable normative goals.