Is objectivity ever possible in Political philosophy? On the epistemic capacities and limitations of methods in the discipline

The objectivity of the research findings can be undoubtedly considered a key desideratum in contemporary scientific research that differentiates scientific knowledge from mere opinions. Objective research should therefore 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. However, the category of objectivity has different applicability in the domain of science and political philosophy. While for the former, it is widely believed that scientific theories have been justified objectively as the empirical observation provides us direct access to the reality, the philosophical or normative theories, no matter how plausible, are widely believed to be rather speculative and in principle unverifiable since the basis for assessing objectivity has accordingly an un-empirical character. 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 paper proposed 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).