Facts, Theories and Types of Political Philosophy

Jerry Cohen notoriously argues that any moral principle that utilizes facts is grounded by another principle that is not grounded by facts. I agree. But that simply means there are general values we maintain that are not subject to empirical evidence. It does not entail that whenever we act on moral principles, we do not need to understand the context in which we should act. Nor does it entail that we require no facts of the case to justify what we do. In this paper I make a distinction between two sorts of political theory and two sorts of facts. In both cases the distinction marks a break in some continuum but is useful when considering what facts should concern political philosophy. The first form of political philosophy, I call ‘applied political philosophy’ addresses current issues such as abortion or LGBQI+ rights and might be applied to a specific case or sets of cases. The second form is concerned with more abstract principles – what institutions do we need for a just state? how should just political institutions regulate markets? I call this ‘constitutional political philosophy’ The second distinction is between ‘contingent’ and ‘abstract’ facts. A ‘contingent fact’ is a specific description of some aspect of the world that happens to be true at a given point in time, such public attitudes in Australia today towards the availability of abortion. An abstract fact is a proposition about what the case is, given positive theories about the way the world works that are supported by current empirical evidence. It is not tied to any specific context, though it is contextual in the sense it will provide predictions about what contingent facts could hold in different conditions. The paper will argue that these two different sorts of facts enter into the two sorts of political theorizing in different ways. The facts that matter most to constitutional political philosophy are abstract facts that utilize theoretical concepts within logical arguments about the processes and mechanisms that tell us how our institutions, our regulations and rules operate within the world. Theorized empirical social science demonstrates these facts. Contingent facts are important in specific contexts but matter a great deal in applied political theory. Underlying the use of all these facts is the fact of value pluralism; and that fact comes about because underlying all our values, our moral principles, are fact-free values or moral principles.