Political philosophers as ‘Attendants’

This paper focuses on active roles that philosophers or normative theorists can perform within public policy. Recent years has observed several calls for increasing the engagement of philosophers in the real-life outcomes. Based on this literature, the paper identifies five possible roles of the philosophers within public policy: (1) ‘Armchair philosopher’, (2) ‘Activist’ (Ypi 2011), (3) ‘Analyst’ (Wolff 2018), (4) ‘Ethnographer’ (Herzog and Zacka 2019, de Shalit 2018), and (5) ‘One-of-the many’ (Ackerly 2018). While these roles can have different advantages in different contexts, this paper argues that within public policy neither of these are entirely suitable. It is both due to the wicked nature of public policy problems and positionality of the philosophers themselves. As an alternative, the paper argues for the role of the philosopher as an ‘attendant’. Here the philosopher acknowledges the normative agency of public policy stakeholders and their ability to identify norms regulating their ideals. However, ‘attendant’ philosophers employ their knowledge and skills to empower stakeholders to overcome embedded biases and to identify possible, or desirable, norms. The paper illustrates the arguments based on public policy work on London’s governance.