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