How to Judge Political Values?

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in discussions of methods in normative political theory around realism and moralism, ideal and non-ideal theory, and so on. We have also begun to see a turn towards more concrete discussions of the how to do political theory in more concrete terms. This includes the growing literature reflective equilibrium; on epistemic injustice; on examining values and principles from different standpoints; on different kinds of genealogy and ideology critique; of the different sources and spheres of normativity; on the role of intuitions and thought-experiments in ethics and political theory; and much more. This work has been making major strides forward that can and should inform not only how we do political theory in the 21st Century, but also how we teach it to future generations of political theorists. Our paper seeks to contribute to this growing literature by developing a typology of different approaches to judging normative values like freedom, equality, and justice. Different approaches to assessing normative values involve similar lists of internal criteria – clarity, coherence, parsimony, deductive closure, etc. Where they differ is in the external tests they employ. We can broadly distinguish between four ideal types here. The first type we call Intuitionism (arguably evidenced in thinkers like Cohen and Nozick), where we use real and imagined cases to determine which concept of e.g. freedom we should prefer. The second type we call Closed Reflective Endorsement (including what many, but not all, consider to be Rawls’ reflective equilibrium), which refers to a continuous process of attempting to make our various considered judgments on different levels coherent with one another. This mandates dropping, replacing, or revising certain convictions in light of overall coherence, as well as employing thought experiments like the Original Position to help the process proceed, formulating normative values that do the best job of capturing the totality of these judgments. The third we call Open Reflective Endorsement (Sen’s Open Impartiality) which additionally requires that we bring in the real or imagined judgments of people in other societies and contexts to form an (internal) impartial spectators that we can use to judge political values. Finally, there’s Critical Reflective Endorsement, which additionally requires an open-ended investigation into the origin, nature, implications, and effects of our political values, intuitions, beliefs, and wider worldviews through tools such as genealogy and ideology critique. Our paper discusses each of these broad methods in turn, their respective strengths and weaknesses, and argues that, on the whole, we should prefer Critical Reflective Endorsement due to its greater reflective powers. A surprising upshot of this is that it supports a closer integration between more “analytical” and “critical theory” approaches to the subject. We close by considering some of the implications this has for the practice and the teaching of political theory today.