Context-sensitivity on conceptual grounds

Contextualism in political philosophy is usually discussed as a family of positions regarding normative principles, e.g. principles of justice, namely that normative principles are not context-independent but in various ways depend on facts about the context for their application and, more importantly, justification. However, political philosophy is not only about principles, it is also about the concepts and categories used to capture and interpret political cases. In what sense can political concepts be sensitive or depend on context? On the one hand, the concepts we use have to fit the specific features of particular cases and are usually developed in order to capture these features. This indicates ways in which concepts must be context-sensitive. On the other hand, the point of concepts is that they subsume specific cases under some more general category. This indicates that concepts cannot be entirely context-specific. The paper first considers some of the different senses of context-sensitivity that these aspects of concepts suggest. This leads to a distinction between context-sensitivity as a feature of the development of political concepts and context-specificity in the application of concepts to cases. Political concepts are often normative or evaluative. Concepts like justice and legitimacy are directly normative. Many other concepts used in political philosophy are descriptive or classificatory, but in ways indirectly linked to normative judgments. The paper considers the concept of a minority group as an example of this mix of classificatory and normative elements of political concepts. There is a purely descriptive (quantitative) concept of a minority. However, this is arguably not the concept of a minority usually relevant in political philosophy. We are usually interested in more qualitative concepts of minority status linked to views about which kind of minority status is normatively relevant. The paper uses the concept of a minority group to consider some of the initially presented senses of context-sensitivity of political concepts. Minority status is especially interesting to consider for this purpose because minority status is necessarily relational. A group is always a minority in relation to other groups or institutional frameworks in a given context, e.g. a more powerful ethnic group or an institutional framework that privileges some groups over others in specific respects. This relational aspect suggests that there is an in-built context-sensitivity in the concept of a minority group. In order to apply the concept of a minority group, one has to make judgments about the relations that are relevant for minority status in the given context. Political philosophy is interested in minority groups as potential subjects of special protection (e.g., against discrimination), of special rights (e.g., exemptions) or compensation. The context-sensitive judgments required for the application of the concept therefore has a normative dimension. If minority status is a possible reason for special protection, then minority status must be linked to the question about what makes certain instances of the relevant context, e.g. a given law or institution, morally wrong. The context-sensitivity of indirectly normative concepts thus connects to contextualism regarding normative principles.