Human beings have invented a vast and diverse set of institutions that coordinate behavior and allocate resources.

These forms include disciplined organizations headed by leaders, voluntary groups that strive to operate by consensus, procedures for voting directly on policies, elected bodies that deliberate and vote, courts that decide cases and controversies (with or without juries, which may or may not be randomly selected), bureaucracies characterized by hierarchies of defined positions, markets with or without firms (which may themselves by mini-dictatorships, bureaucracies, or co-ops), markets for capital, informal norms defined by a widespread assumption that everyone else will behave in certain ways, scientific disciplines organized by peer-review and replication, and networks that newcomers can join by agreeing to relay messages to other members.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive and is not closed. Several important forms are no more than 300 years old, and the last one originated within the past half century. In the future, new forms will be invented.

We should not view current institutions complacently, since many originated in injustice and still perpetuate bad outcomes. To name just one example, the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, pioneered essential features of capital markets, including shares that could be resold on the world’s first stock market and a board accountable to shareholders. Its major activities included conquest, ethnic cleansing, and slavery. And I do not mean to cite a corporation alone, since governmental forms are also rooted in cruelty.

But I do start with the assumption that each of these forms has been invented and has survived because it serves significant functions and offers distinctive advantages. Also, each one can be improved. Progress is by no means inevitable, but we can identify and enhance changes that are beneficial. A certain kind of arrogance is required to assume that any one of these forms is simply bad and should be dispensed with.

In that case, we must decide which institutional forms should be used for each social purpose. And a second-order question: which institution(s) should decide this matter?

A decision about which institution should play any given role typically looks like a law (although it might technically be a constitutional provision, a decree, or a regulation). For example, to have an independent, private press or else a governmental media system requires a law. Likewise for health insurance.

Which institutions can yield such laws? Not a market, which simply doesn’t offer products that look like laws. Nor are people invited to reason about the role of various other institutions when they are participating in market exchanges.

A king, dictator, high priest, or junta can decide which institution will do what. Instead of grabbing all power for himself, a ruler may favor courts or markets (think of Frederick the Great or Augusto Pinochet). Regardless, we do not want rulers to make these decisions for two major reasons. First, they cannot be trusted to decide which institutions work best for all, when they stand to profit for making them work mainly for themselves. Besides, even in the rare case of a benign despot, he cannot know enough about how each institution affects all the people of the society to be able to decide wisely.

In the US system, courts sometimes decide which kinds of institutions may do what. In the 1905 Lochner decision, the Supreme Court notoriously gave control over wages and working decisions to companies rather than the state. When judges seem to be deciding such cases on the basis of their own views (a charge against the current Supreme Court), then they appear no different from juntas. The special advantage of a court is not allocating responsibilities among institutions but interpreting and applying laws created by other institutions to adjudicate specific cases.

Science might be able to decide which institution works best for each purpose–if this turns out to be a tractable research question. Coase’s Theorem is supposed to be a result of research that proves the superiority of competitive markets for many purposes; some versions of Marxism are supposed to prove the deep flaws of capitalism.

I view these claims as useful inputs to reasoning about which institutions are best for various purposes. Research should be taken seriously and should develop further. I doubt it will ever resolve the discussion, because the choice of institutions involves conflicting values and interests, not merely empirical claims, and also because the world keeps changing as a result of people’s uncontrollable behavior. Any institution that is neatly designed according to a theory will soon be subverted by people who understand it and “hack” its design.

If the decision about which institution should do what looks like a law, and we don’t want rulers, judges, or specialized experts to make such laws, then the best candidate is a democracy. As Knight and Johnson (2014) argue, a democracy elicits views about the role of various other institutions, it gives everyone an equal opportunity to affect the decision, and it permits continued reflection once a decision is made.

One does not need optimistic assumptions about individuals’ wisdom or their tendency to learn from other people to believe that our best available way to decide the role of other institutions is to have an ongoing debate in civil society, then to empower elected, accountable representatives to vote, and then to debate the results and reconsider the decisions.

In fact, a reasonably healthy democracy seems to be one in which political competition is about the role of other institutions. For example, things would be going better if US voters were thinking about whether the government of the United States should channel resources into “green” technologies or else leave the allocation of capital to markets. I mention this example because the 2024 election is not about the pros or cons of Biden’s channeling more than a trillion dollars into green industries, but about who counts as a real American.

The above argument is deeply inspired by Knight and Johnson. Paul Aligica (2014) dissents in part. He sees all the different kinds of institutions as more or less on par within a polycentric order. He argues that institutions should and do grow and change as a result of decentralized decisions made by many actors across the society as a whole. In that sense, the people rule through all the institutions. Aligica defends an elected, democratic government but emphasizes that it cannot assess and influence the other institutions wisely unless they develop robustly and independently and demonstrate successes and failures.

I think Aligica makes valid points, but the gap between him and Knight and Johnson is not very wide, and I’m inclined to endorse the priority of democracy as long as we remember (as Knight and Johnson do) that a plurality of institutions is an asset for democratic government.

Sources: Jack Knight and James Johnson, The priority of democracy: Political consequences of pragmatism. Princeton University Press, 2014; Paul Aligica, Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. See also polycentricity: the case for a (very) mixed economy; modus vivendi theory; what if people’s political opinions are very heterogeneous?; China teaches the value of political pluralism, etc.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
  -- Wallace Stevens, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" (1921)

For those who are interested in the most fundamental questions, it has often proven useful to ask about the thinker rather than what is thought. We can derive insights about the world by first understanding our own predispositions and limitations.

Hence the early Buddhists went searching for the self and found only the five aggregates (form, sensation, perception, volition, consciousness), Socrates tested various kinds of expertise, Aristotle based his system on logic, the sixth Chan patriarch Huineng found truth in his own original nature once all attachments fell away, Ibn al-Haytham explored optics to understand space and matter, Descartes proposed to ground philosophy on a critical theory of reason, Hegel analyzed the logic of history because he saw reason as cumulative, Husserl turned to pure experience, and Wittgenstein looked to the ordinary language with which we express thoughts.

These are examples of examining the subjective to understand what is objective.

For me, the most basic truth about our thought is that we use brains that evolved for specific needs, leaving us with severely limited cognitive powers and motives that are dubious, even by our own lights.

Indeed, we come into the world knowing almost nothing and hold most of our beliefs because of what other members of our species have told us. We are able to believe many different things, but what we actually believe depends in large part on who has influenced us, which is the result of our surrounding social structure–things like schools and publishers and churches and governments. And all social structures are dubious, even by our own lights.

I would believe very different things if I were a medieval Catholic, let alone a dolphin. Each organism has its own Umwelt (self-centered world), or kyogai (bounded consciousness, in Zen), or “mundo” in Stevens’ idiosyncratic vocabulary.

This relativism is grounds for humility but not an excuse for blanket skepticism. We can make and test specific inferences. Our understanding can accumulate, albeit from many starting points. We are obliged to think as well as we can and not to ignore what we have reason to believe.

Considering the knowledge that has accumulated for me, I think I discern two main pillars.

One is natural science, which assumes and reinforces a picture of nature as impersonal, purposeless. Things happen because things previously happened.

The other is ethics, in the very general sense that what matters is experience, not only my experience. “Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone. They must be warded off simply because they are suffering” (Shantideva, 8.102-3).

Science and ethics stand separately. Neither lends support to the other. Each can be doubted in a very abstract way. Many human beings have denied each of them, and I could deny them as well. But such doubt is abstract because I have been formed by accumulated thought that supports both pillars.

Further, these two assumptions are responsible. Not to care about others is selfish; not to accept the basic purposelessness of nature is sentimental. We are to address suffering in a world that will not offer respite by itself. To doubt science or ethics is a mere temptation, not a responsible option.

On this planet, the general principles of a purposeless nature have generated the logic of natural selection, which causes increasingly complex organisms to proliferate against the current of entropy. In earth’s animal kingdom, this complexity has yielded sensitivity and, ultimately, experience.

Nothing suggests that evolution would tend toward happiness. On the contrary, a sensitive animal is more likely to survive if it experiences negative emotions, such as fear and aversion. Nor is there any reason to expect that an evolved brain would be able to understand itself. The first-person world–the stream of consciousness–is a slippery thing for us because we are not well designed for meta-cognition. We can describe the Umwelt of a deer-tick but not our own. We resort to crude words like “self” and “world” or “cause” and “effect” that seem inadequate to what we experience.

Recognizing the abstract idea that the world is experienced differently by other kinds of people and species reminds us that it has unplumbed depths. Attending very closely to our own experience offers hints of what we normally miss. Listening to others describe their experience enriches our own and encourages compassion by directing attention to their emotions and the causes of their experiences, something that our evolved brains seem able to do.

Genuine compassion demands action, and action to address suffering keeps one from marinating in one’s own concerns. We should listen not only to homo sapiens but also to other sentient creatures. But it is a mistake to attend only to others, since each of us is usually best placed to hear and respond to our own stream of consciousness, which is easy for us to ignore. If we can find ways to share what we find within, without burdening other people with self-indulgent confessions, then what we share about ourselves may be a gift for them.

Modern philosophers call the very close description of one’s own experience “phenomenology.” This practice has ancient roots. For Husserl, the ancient Buddhist Pali Canon was exemplary of phenomenology. He wrote that understanding its “joyous mastery of the world … means a great adventure” for those who start with different assumptions–in his case, with concepts derived from Protestantism (trans. in Hanna 1995). In other words, the Pali Canon offered both a skillful description of human experience in general and an alternative to Husserl’s local context. Exploring this alternative liberated him from himself.

Not only ancient Buddhist scriptures and dense modern phenomenological treatises but also many literary texts and images offer hints about consciousness as experienced by specific people. Since the mind is constantly attentive to the world and to other minds, a work that describes nature or people is also an account of the one who experiences such things. Thus a poem about a nightingale or a painting of a haystack or a fiction about one day in Dublin is also a kind of phenomenology. As Stevens said (I am on a Stevens kick right now), “Poetry is one of the enlargements of life.”

We have brains designed for survival, which means that they are destined for suffering. But this inheritance has equipped us with the capacity to “enlarge” ourselves by listening generously–listening to others, to nature, and to ourselves.

Again, to listen seriously compels compassionate action. If we act for the sake of a good outcome, we will inevitably be frustrated, so we must act just to be compassionate (which, however, implies thoughtfully choosing the most effective means). And since each of us is cognitively limited and motivationally flawed, we should almost always decide what to do together. This is where the inner life and civic life come together.

Sources: F.J. Hanna, “Husserl on the teachings of the Buddha,” The Humanistic Psychologist, 23(3), (1995) 365–372; Shantideva, The Bodhiicaryacatara, trans. by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford University Press, 1995). See also: Cuttings version 2.0: a book about happiness; verdant mountains usually walk; Montaigne the bodhisattva?; Wallace Stevens’ idea of order; the fetter; thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition; joys and limitations of phenomenology; and a Husserlian meditation.

We human beings must constantly struggle to understand justice: how society should be organized and what we should do to make it better.

We are cognitively limited and prone to bias, and we come into the world knowing nothing. Our only chance of reaching a satisfactory understanding of justice during the time we have is to join some kind of ongoing conversation.

People participate in many such conversations, including those in religious traditions and all kinds of communities. One venue–among many others–is academic work within political theory and political philosophy.

Like anyone else, an academic who seeks to understand justice must join a conversation. One way to do this–which I endorse–is to engage with significant written works. If such texts are old, they may have generated secondary literatures that include critical responses which are also significant. If they are new, they typically benefit from previous works. Contributing to the secondary literature is one way to advance the conversation about justice.

Another way is to learn from people who are currently striving to advance justice in various settings. We can learn from the writing (and audio and video material) that they produce for public consumption. That approach is like reading books about politics, except that the genres, authors, and audiences are different.

We can also learn from the less formal, less polished, less public discourse (and activity) that occurs within communities, organizations, and movements as they decide what they should do.

This is the approach that Brooke Ackerly and colleagues (2021) call “grounded normative theory.” Please also visit engagedtheory.net to learn more. Today, Ackerly is visiting the Institute for Civically Engaged Research, which I co-lead at Tufts with Samantha Majic and Adriano Udani on behalf of the American Political Science Association.

In my view, grounded normative theory is not descriptive qualitative research, although it often begins with that. Its purpose is not to interpret or explain what people are saying. Its goal is to decide what we should do, and the input or data is the discourse of practical groups. Activists, organizers, and participants in movements provide insights, and the theorist is obliged to respond independently. Ideally, both partners learn from the exchange.

Because a grounded normative theorist is interested in what people are thinking and saying to each other–not necessarily what they have produced for public consumption– the theorist must engage personally with such groups. For instance, Ackerly is a co-founder of the Global Feminisms Collaborative, not just an observer of it.

A lot of engaged normative theory looks to marginalized communities and adversarial social movements. There is an enormous amount to learn from such sources. I would add, however, that we can develop important normative insights from more “bourgeois” practitioners. For example, the Justice in Schools project “helps moral, political, and educational theorists ask the right questions about justice in non-ideal contexts, develops new language to talk about educational ethics, and provides empirically-informed frameworks for developing a philosophically rigorous and pragmatically useful theory of educational justice.” Justice in Schools has produced a large collection of “normative case studies” that are often written by teachers for teachers. The program not only serves an audience of educators but also enriches political philosophy by posing new questions, much as bioethics has done for decades.

Lately, I am being drawn into projects on Artificial Intelligence. I am most interested in deriving questions and insights from developers and computer scientists. At least at this stage in the history of political philosophy, the pre-cooked normative theories seem rather stale; but it is exciting to engage with novel ethical questions that emerge from practice.

See: Ackerly, B., Cabrera, L., Forman, F., Johnson, G. F., Tenove, C., & Wiener, A. (2021). Unearthing grounded normative theory: practices and commitments of empirical research in political theory. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 27(2), 156–182. See also why ambitious ethical theories don’t serve applied ethics; applied ethics need not mean applying ethical systems; bootstrapping value commitments