SWIFT 1999. Public Opinion & Political Philosophy - Relation Betw Social-scientific & Philosophical...

PUBLIC OPINION AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 337

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2: 337363, 1999. 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

ADAM SWIFT

PUBLIC OPINION AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY:THE RELATION BETWEEN SOCIAL-SCIENTIFIC AND

PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSES OF DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE1

ABSTRACT. This paper considers the relation between philosophical discussions of,and social-scientific research into popular beliefs about, distributive justice. The firstpart sets out the differences and tensions between the two perspectives, identifyingconsiderations which tend to lead adherents of each discipline to regard the other as irrelevantto its concerns. The second discusses four reasons why social scientists might benefit fromphilosophy: problems in identifying inconsistency, the fact that non-justice considerationsmight underlie distributive judgments, the way in which different principles of justice canyield the same concrete distributive judgments, and the ambiguity of key terms. The thirdpart distinguishes and evaluates three versions of the claim that normative theorising aboutjustice can profit from empirical research into public opinion: that its findings are food forthought, that they amount to feasibility constraints, and that they are constitutive ofnormatively justified principles of justice. The view that popular opinion about justicehas a strongly constitutive role to play in justifying principles of distributive justicestricto sensu is rejected, but it is argued that what the people think (and what they canreasonably be expected to come to think) on distributive matters can be an importantfactor for the political theorist to take into account, for reasons of legitimacy, or feasibility,or both.

KEY WORDS: desert, distributive justice, public opinion, John Rawls, social justice,Michael Walzer

1. INTRODUCTION

What is the proper relation between social-scientific research into peoplesbeliefs about distributive justice and normative philosophising on thesubject? Sociologists and psychologists have produced an extensiveliterature attempting to describe and explain peoples beliefs aboutdistributive matters, while the normative investigation of what justicemeans and what it requires of us has received no less attention from political

1 An ancestor of this paper was given at a Conference on Social-Scientific and Nor-mative Analyses of Justice at the European University Institute, Florence, in 1993. Partsof it subsequently appeared in Swift et al. (1995). I am grateful to my co-authors and toAldine de Gruyter for permission to reproduce those parts here. Work on it was com-pleted during a stay as Visiting Fellow in the Social and Political Theory Group in theResearch School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, where itbenefitted from discussions with Richard Holton, Susan Mendus, and Michael Smith,and from comments at presentations both there and at the University of Melbourne.

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philosophers. Despite occasional calls for the enrichment of the one bythe other, and even more occasional suggestions as to how exactly thismight be brought about and to what effect, there have been few systematicattempts to address the question of what these two approaches can do forone another (notable exceptions are Miller (1994) and Elster (1995)). Thispaper, reflecting my involvement in the International Social Justice Project(see Kluegel et al. (1995) for details), is an attempt to tackle that questionhead on.

Much of what follows is sceptical. I argue that social scientists have muchto learn from philosophers, the main lesson being how difficult it is for themever really to get at peoples beliefs about principles of justice. Thisscepticism is tempered, however, by an acknowledgement that there are otherkinds of distributive belief that such research can tell us about and that maybe more important. A similar claim emerges from my discussion of whatnormative theorists have to learn from the findings of empirical research.Here I reject the view that popular opinion about justice has a stronglyconstitutive role to play in justifying principles of justice stricto sensu, andshow that some of those who might be thought to accord it such a role donot in fact do so. But I acknowledge a weaker constitutive role and claimthat what the people think (and what they can reasonably be expected to cometo think) on distributive matters can be an important factor for the politicaltheorist to take into account for reasons of legitimacy, or feasibility, or both.

2. DIFFERENCES AND TENSIONS

The view that social science and political philosophy have little to say toone another, in this area at least, is easily stated. The justification ofprinciples of justice seems simply to occupy a different logical space fromthe description and explanation of the principles to which people actuallysubscribe. Indeed, and here the difference begins to turn into anopposition or tension, since philosophers reasons for favouring aparticular set of principles are likely to be rather complicated and tohave taken a great deal of thought to arrive at, it would perhaps besurprising if ordinary people, not necessarily less intelligent but in allprobability having devoted less time to the exercise of that intelligenceon this particular question, agreed with them. Normative politicalphilosophy understands itself as providing reasons why people shouldendorse particular conceptions of justice, and the conceptions that peoplehappen empirically to espouse would appear not only to be of littlerelevance but also likely to lack the very sophistication that philosophersseek to achieve.


This was certainly the view of one of the anonymous referees who wasasked to comment upon Gordon Marshalls request for funding for theBritish leg of the ISJP:

Surveys of popular opinion on these topics seem to me of little academic value...Thegreat debate about justice that has been in progress since the time of Plato has thrownup many difficulties. But we will not be helped in the least in the resolution of thesedifficulties by a knowledge of the quirks of public opinion. Justice is, one might almostsay, a semi-technical notion. It is the topic discussed by Plato in the Republic, byAquinas in Summa Theologia, and by Mill in Utilitarianism... . Someone who knowsnothing of this material is hardly in a position to contribute to the resolution of ourproblems. It would seem therefore a waste of time to survey the views of people whoare not in a position to judge the issues...2

From this perspective, there is no problem in concluding that people aresimply wrong in advocating distributive principles that more carefulthought, or perhaps even superior moral sense, would lead them to disavow.

The flip side of these philosophical doubts about the value of social-scientific research is the social scientists tendency to mistrust thephilosophers search for rational justification and truth. That Justice isin the eye of the beholder is widely recognized by social psychologists,reports Tornblom (1992, p. 177), and the fallacious inference from theexplanatory importance of subjective perceptions to the meta-ethical claimthat moral judgments are merely subjective and not susceptible to criteriaof rational assessment is widespread. Quite understandably struck notonly by the sheer variety of views about justice espoused by lay socialactors but also by the myriad of competing conceptions of justice putforward by academic philosophers, the social scientist is likely to dismissthe task of answering the question Just what is just? as hopeless andpompous (Reis 1984, p. 38). This is again a bad inference, since the mereexistence of disagreement about which conception of justice is rightcannot warrant the conclusion that no such conception could be. It is moreplausible, perhaps, to doubt that even if the, ex hypothesi, true (or reasonable)moral distributive theory were to be arrived at philosophically, its advocateswould be unable to secure acknowledgement of its truth (or reasonableness)and agreement on its substance. This is not to deny the very idea of anormative philosophical position being right but simply to assert theempirical predictive claim perhaps itself of great importance to thenormative theorist that people are unlikely to agree on any position,whether right or not.

2 The Economic and Social Research Council took a different view and supported theresearch with grant number R000232421.

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Fuelling the philosophical scepticism characteristic of social scientists,and another source of tension between the two approaches, is the fact thatthe social-scientific project is explanatory as well as descriptive. Socialscience seeks to provide causal explanations of those very justice judgmentsfor or against which the political philosopher seeks to supply reasons. Fromthe explanatory perspective, this search for causes is likely to tell againstthe significance of philosophical argument. If a persons class origins,gender, personal history of social mobility, experience of solidaristicrelations, and so on are regarded as playing a causal role in forming herbeliefs about distributive justice, then it is not clear what role is left forthe rational argument that it is the philosophers project to provide. Fromthe other side, of course, those committed to the practice of reason-givingare likely to regard the search for causal explanations of beliefs asessentially irrelevant. The reasons for a belief and its causal origins aredifferent in kind, and it seems open to the normative philosopher to arguethat nothing to do with the explanation of why someone holds a particularconception of justice tells for or against that conceptions being morallyjustified.

A distinct, but again misplaced, source of social-scientific scepticismabout normative philosophising derives more specifically from the socialscientists awareness of the extent to which, as a matter of empirical fact,peoples distributive judgments are complex and highly context-specific(Tornblom 1992). But this only constitutes an objection to the search for avalid normative theory if one assumes both that that the judgments peopleordinarily make must in some way or other inform ones view about thejudgments that they have reason to make and that philosophical normativetheories of justice are by their very nature insensitive to the complexityand context-specificity of justice judgments. This latter assumption seemsmistaken. It is true that philosophers tend to formulate their positions interms that abstract from complexity and transcend particularity of contexts,to seek the deeper structures of thought, the more general and widelyapplicable reasons, that ought to guide our concrete judgments. Accordingto Walzer (1983, p. 4), the first impulse of the philosopher is . . . to searchfor some underlying unity: a short list of basic goods, quickly abstractedto a single good; a single distributive criterion or an interconnected set;and the philosopher himself standing, symbolically at least, at a singledecision point. Perhaps this is the philosophical impulse. But we shouldnot confuse Walzers pluralistic substantive theory with the anti-philosophical methodology he claims to use to arrive at it. There is nothingin principle incoherent about the idea of a full-bloodedly philosophical


theory of justice that was itself pluralistic and acknowledged that one couldnot expect to make correct judgments about particular distributive issueswithout knowing a great deal of detail about the particulars of the situationone was being asked to judge. It may simply be right that what should countas a just distribution depends on various characteristics of the good beingdistributed, the individuals among whom it is being distributed, the relationbetween those individuals, and so on. A wholeheartedly philosophicalnormative conception of justice could consist of just such a complex andplural set of considerations.

So: philosophers tend to dismiss the significance of empirical researchbecause what people believe and what they ought to believe are differentin kind, and philosophy is a quasi-technical discipline. Social scientiststend towards moral scepticism, partly because they observe not onlyordinary people but also professional philosophers disagreeing about whatjustice demands, partly because causal explanations seem in some sensecompetitive with the rational justification of justice beliefs, and partlybecause social scientists are so aware of the multiplicity, complexity andcontext-specificity of peoples justice judgments. Indeed, they are alsoaware of the extent to which the judgments of individual lay actors arecontradictory and inconsistent. The inference from people disagree aboutthe truth of what is just to there is no truth about what is just perhapsgains plausibility from the observation that people seem to disagree notonly with one another but also with themselves. That inference remainsinvalid. But one can understand why those who spend their time wadingthrough the contradictions and confusions in ordinary minds should growdoubtful of the claim that there is a coherent, albeit possibly complex,philosophical truth to be apprehended.

3. SOCIAL SCIENCE NEEDS PHILOSOPHY?

This issue of individual inconsistency raises the question of the extent towhich social-scientific research necessarily requires philosophical analysis.As my colleagues and I have argued elsewhere (Burgoyne et al. 1993), thecontext-specificity of distributive judgments, the possibility of sophisticatedcontextual reasoning, and the different interpretations to which principlesof justice are reasonably subject make it very difficult to ascertain forcertain whether judgments that appear inconsistent really are so. This isnot, of course, to deny that people often are inconsistent, and for a varietyof reasons ranging from intellectual incompetence to self-servinghypocrisy. Indeed, even if it cannot warrant the conclusion that there is no

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such thing as justice, the extent of confusion and contradiction in ordinaryminds may quite reasonably lead one to doubt any justificatory strategythat claims to give a significant role to empirical opinion. But often theevidence adduced to support the charge of inconsistency simply fails toestablish the case. It is not necessarily inconsistent to believe in the justiceof a more equal society but be unwilling oneself to pay more taxes: perhapsthe respondent giving these apparently contradictory views believes thatshe is already paying more than her fair share, or that revenue currentlyspent on defence should be diverted to social welfare. Similarly, thosewho advocate the abolition of private education but send their children toprivate schools need not be hypocritical or suffering from moral weakness:perhaps they think that were private education to be abolished the qualityof state education would increase sufficiently for them to discharge throughstate schools that parental obligation that they believe currently requiresthem to go private. Finally, and here we have an example not of contextualreasoning but of straightforward difference in interpretation, it is notnecessarily inconsistent to believe that justice demands equality ofopportunity but permits people to pass their wealth on to their children;for example if equality of opportunity is taken to mean only that peoplesrace or gender should be irrelevant to their employment prospects.

These examples suggest that there is a philosophical component to theinterpretation of empirical findings, and this alone would seem sufficientto persuade the social scientist of her need for philosophical assistance.The empirical researcher, however sceptical of the philosophers normativeproject, cannot escape the demands of analytical precision and clarity, forher very claim that her subjects do not themselves possess precise and clearviews about justice presupposes her ability to identify what they do thinkabout justice and to recognize what a clear and precise view about justicelooks like and this in turn requires awareness of the theoretical complexitiesthat are the stuff of philosophical analysis. (See also Miller 1994, pp. 169174) and Bell and Schokkaert (1992, p. 247)).

Let me illustrate this claim further by reference to my experience in theISJP. One of the guiding theoretical ideas underlying the construction ofthe questionnaire was the distinction between peoples judgments aboutwhat is the case and their judgments about what ought to be the case: thedifference, for example, between the belief that people do get rewardedfor effort and the belief that they ought to be so rewarded, or between viewsabout what factory workers actually earn and views about what they oughtto earn. An immediate problem raised by the distinction in this form is thatpeoples beliefs about what ought to be the case are not necessarilyequivalent to their beliefs about justice. This is because it is conventional,


at least among philosophers, to distinguish between the demands of justiceand the demands of morality more broadly understood: perhaps justicerequires a certain distribution but some other moral consideration precludesit, or perhaps justice does not require a certain distribution but the moralclaims of humanity or charity (Campbell 1974), or an independent moralideal such as social equality (Miller 1994, pp. 17374), do. We could thusfind our respondents saying that people ought to get what they need, orthat managing directors should only earn five times as much as assemblyline workers, without knowing whether this was something that theyregarded as a principle of justice.

One problem, then, is that the researcher needs to take care that she isgetting at what people think about justice.3 Philosophy is needed to identifythe appropriate subset of moral concerns. A second concerns the way inwhich one cannot directly infer peoples beliefs about principles of justicefrom their beliefs about the justice of particular distributions, or even fromtheir beliefs about the justice of particular distributive principles. Supposeone found (as we did) that more than 90% of people believe that a justsociety is one whose members have equality of opportunity. Is this becausethey subscribe to a principle of desert and hold that such a society is likelyto give people what they deserve? Because they believe that people equallyhave a right to self-realisation and regard equality of opportunity as theprecondition of its realisation? Or because they have a Rawlsian concernfor the worst-off and believe that such a society will make better use ofthe pool of ability, hence be more productive, and hence work to thatgroups long-term advantage? Suppose one found that (as we did) thatpeople think that the income disparities that they believe to exist betweenfactory workers and managing directors are unjust, and (as we did not) thatthe just incomes attaching to those two occupations would be equal. Is thisbecause they believe that people deserve to be rewarded for hard work (andfor hard work alone) and they think that factory workers work as hard as

3 The obvious way to do this is to ask them questions specifically about justice, and sowe did. The success of this strategy will, however, depend on the extent to which re-spondents are sensitive to the precise wording of the questions put to them. Asking themabout what they think justice requires does not guarantee that they will answer in thoseterms. A further problem is that in many areas it seems natural to use the term fair todenote this stricter domain, and ISJP pilot studies suggested that that we risked not mak-ing sense to our respondents if we insisted on the philosophically precise point thatfairness is but one way of thinking about justice. Here we were left in an impossiblesituation: the only way to defend ourselves against the charge of prejudicing our findingsby equating justice with fairness (rather than, for example, with entitlement) was to usean adjective just that was, in some contexts, not part of the ordinary language ofour respondents and so risked the unintelligibility problem that I discuss below.

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managing directors? Or is it because they reject the view that people deserveto be rewarded for hard work but reject also any other attempts to justifyinequality as just? Again, philosophy is needed to tell the social scientistthat particular judgments as to the justice or otherwise of particulardistributions, or even of particular distributive principles such as equalityof opportunity, cannot license inferences about which particular principlesof justice are being endorsed.

Researchers can of course try to combat this problem by ensuring thattheir research instruments are formulated as carefully as possible to capturefoundational principles of justice rather than more superficial distributivejudgments. The ISJP questionnaire had distinctions between desert,entitlement, fairness, functional inequality (i.e. inequality conducive to thelong-term advantage of the worst-off) built into its questions and doingthis inevitably involved awareness of the philosophical literature.We didnot, however, and I will argue a survey questionnaire cannot, go far enough.

Consider the question of desert. It is clearly important to distinguishbetween the idea that people deserve to be rewarded for effort and the ideathat they deserve to be rewarded for possessing valuable skills orintelligence. The statements we put to respondents in an attempt to get atthis distinction were People who work hard deserve to earn more thanthose who do not and Its just luck if some people are more skillful orintelligent than others, so they dont deserve to earn more money. Butthe second of these contains two distinct claims. Accordingly, when peopledisagree with the statement, this might be because they do not accept thatintelligence and skill are a matter of luck (perhaps they believe that apersons skill is a result of their efforts in developing their natural abilities)or because they do regard them as chance attributes but think themdeserving of reward nonetheless. To see the depth of the problem, noticethat even if we had been able to establish that it was the latter, this wouldstill leave indeterminacy. Respondents might be understanding the desertclaim as one about legitimate expectations, given current institutions andpractices, rather than as a claim about desert in a stronger, pre-institutionalsense. Or it might even be that they are using the notion of desert as ashorthand for a consequentialist claim as when somebody says that shebelieves that brain surgeons deserve to earn more money than hospitalorderlies because she thinks that if brain surgeons did not earn more thennobody would want to be one. Unless one knows what respondentsunderstand by questions about desert, one simply cannot tell which of thesevarious quite distinct positions they are endorsing.

It is tempting to think that this kind of indeterminacy could have been,perhaps should have been, removed. If one really wants to find out what


people think about such fine-tuned issues, then one should ask appropriatelyfine-tuned questions. The objection to this suggestion comes in twovariants. The first is that such questions will involve a considerabledistancing from the cruder ways in which non-philosophers think aboutdistributive matters and will thereby be open to the charge of imposing ontheir respondents categories that are quite alien to them, and thereby ofcreating data that fail to correspond to the mind-sets of lay social actors.This is something that social researchers are generally supposed to avoid.But it is obvious that finding out what people believe about difficultphilosophical issues will involve getting them to think in ways that theyare not used to. So unless one is opposed to the whole project of seeingwhat people think about such issues after reflection of a kind they maynot previously have undertaken one must surely accept the offering, ifnot the imposing, of categories with which they are not already familiar.4

More worrying is the variant of the objection that points to the sheerimpracticability of a philosophically more precise questionnaire. A surveycomposed of questions unintelligible to many of its respondents and asurvey attempting to get at distinctions of the kind outlined above willsurely consist of such questions will not be a good way of finding outwhat its respondents think about anything. This objection seems to mecompelling. It is simply impractical to attempt by means of a surveyquestionnaire to identify what a representative sample of the populationthinks about the kind of issue that divides philosophers, because one cannotget sensible responses to questions that use formulations unintelligible tothe majority of those being surveyed, and the issues that divide philosopherscannot be formulated in any other way.

What method would do better? Confidently to identify peoples beliefsabout philosophical issues one will need, I think, to teach them somephilosophy. So the proper investigative method is something like a seriesof tutorials, or at least a series of lectures or classes explaining thesedistinctions, illustrating them by means of examples, allowing people toask questions, and so on, followed by a now intelligible questionnaire. Onewill not, perhaps, know whether one is identifying the beliefs that peopleheld prior to the research process, causing them to revise their beliefs in

4 We countered the reasonable element of this objection as best we could, whilst main-taining our philosophical purity, by ensuring, first, that respondents were able to answerdont know as well as neither agree or disagree, and second, in the case of the Britishsurvey alone, that we had an open-ended question in which respondents were invited tosay what they thought about social justice - and particularly encouraged to mention ideasthat were different from those in our questionnaire - with our interviewers instructed towrite down whatever they said.

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the course of that process, or simply leading them to have beliefs on issueswhere previously they had none. But only in this way can the problemsdiscussed above be overcome.5

I have argued that social scientists need philosophy if they are to makegood their claim to be investigating lay actors beliefs about principles ofdistributive justice. This started as a modest claim about difficulties ininterpreting findings and ended with the bolder but in fact rather obvioussuggestion that one needs to teach people some philosophy before one canfind out what they think about philosophical matters. But why should thesocial scientist be concerned to investigate such matters in the first place?If ordinary people do not always distinguish between what justice requiresand what ought to be the case, or between desert and legitimate expecta-tions, does this not show that the considerations outlined above are simplyirrelevant to the social-scientific endeavour? The nice distinctions that arethe philosophers stock-in-trade would seem to have no explanatory ordescriptive implications if they do not correspond to the ways in whichsocial actors themselves conceive distributive issues this is what motivatesthe worry about imposing categories on respondents. Perhaps socialscientists do not particularly care about what people believe aboutprinciples of justice stricto sensu. They are interested in the vaguer, lessprecise judgments that ordinary people ordinarily make, and if philosophersrefuse to grant these the status of principles of justice then that is theirproblem. On this account, empirical researchers often are not researchingwhat philosophers would consider ordinary peoples principles of justicebut this is something that they can happily concede.

To be sure, insofar as she is concerned to explain and predict what peoplebelieve and are likely to believe about the justice of a distribution inchanged circumstances or with new information, it may well be that thesocial scientist cannot afford to ignore some of the distinctions outlinedabove. The significance of the finding that, in a particular case, incentivepayments are unnecessary or ineffective will be different depending onwhether peoples support for the inequality in question is justified on desert-based or incentive-based grounds (Miller 1994, p. 175). Similarly, withindesert, it will make a good deal of difference to their particular judgments

5 There are some similarities between this proposal and Fishkins (1995) deliberativeopinion polls. Fishkin, however, is driven to endorse deliberative polls because he thinkswe should care about peoples informed views on matters of political concern aboutwhich they are likely already to have uninformed views. My proposal is motivated bydoubt that members of the public have views on, or can understand questions about,principles of justice as those are discussed by philosophers.


as to the justice of particular policies whether they believe that peopledeserve to be rewarded for effort but not natural talent, or for both. If youare interested in predicting justice judgments, then doubtless you needcarefully and correctly to identify the principles that generate thosejudgments.

But why should one be interested in justice judgments specifically? Theobvious answer is that they matter because they explain what people do.As Miller (1994, p. 176) puts it, citing Barrington Moore (1979) in support,It has often been maintained indeed it is almost a truism thatexperiencing a situation as unjust is what leads people to protest against itand to take action to alter it, and the literature, both social-scientific andnormative, abounds with claims to this effect. (For examples of each seeGoode (1978, p. 329) and Nozick (1974, p. 158)). Despite such widespreadagreement, however, a sense of injustice is surely neither a necessary nora sufficient condition for such action.

Put to one side more generally sceptical doubts about the significanceof peoples moral beliefs, and certainly about the significance of their moralbeliefs as stated to an interviewer, for what people do. These doubts playa major role in explaining social-scientific mistrust of research into justicebeliefs, but I am here considering a more specific possibility, one that hasforce even on the assumption that people are typically motivated to act inaccordance with their moral judgments. This is the possibility that peoplemight believe a distribution to be unjust but still not believe that it shouldbe altered. The point noted above, that we cannot take peoples views aboutwhat ought to be the case as equivalent to their views about justice, makesit an open question how much weight and significance people accord theirviews on justice.6

One might, for example, hold it to be unjust that the wealthy should beable to convert their greater ability to pay into superior health care, oreducation, or to bequeath their wealth to their children, but nonethelessbelieve that the incentive structure necessary for a productive economy,given people as they are and the international economy as it is, requires,as a moral demand, that such conversions be permitted. Similarly, one mightthink it unjust that people should command superior rewards for possessingscarce natural talents but accept, again on incentive grounds, the on-balanceadvantages of a system that rewards their exercise. If people can acceptthat justice would require one course of action but nonetheless regardreasons of justice as trumped by moral reasons that require another, then

6 I am grateful to Volker Schmidt whose question What do we know when we knowwhat people believe about justice? alerted me to this possibility.

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justice need not be overridingly motivating. In which case, social scientists,supposing them to be concerned ultimately with the description, explana-tion and prediction of action, should not necessarily care about justice ratherthan the more general distributive judgments, and rather vaguer ways ofconceiving distributive issues, that they are accustomed to investigate.This possibility suggests that the question of how people conceive therelation between their beliefs about justice and their other moral beliefsis one that would itself repay empirical philosophically informed investigation.

A summary of the argument of this section may be helpful. There arefour reasons why social scientists might benefit from philosophy: problemsin identifying inconsistency, the fact that non-justice considerations mightunderlie distributive judgments, the way in which different principles ofjustice can yield the same distributive judgments, and the ambiguity of keyterms such as desert. The standard survey questionnaire is incapable ofidentifying popular beliefs about principles of justice specified with theprecision that interests philosophers, although one administered after a doseof philosophical education might be able to do so. The social scientist can,however, reply that she is not particularly interested in principles of justicestricto sensu, a reply that gains force from the observation that principlesof justice are not necessarily decisive for action, even among those forwhom moral considerations all things considered are indeed overridinglymotivating.

4. PHILOSOPHY NEEDS SOCIAL SCIENCE?

Despite the prima facie irrelevance of empirical opinion to normativejustification outlined earlier, and forcibly voiced by our anonymous referee,recent years have witnessed a variety of developments on the philosophicalside that seem to indicate an increasing appreciation of the normativerelevance of empirical work. According to Miller (1992, p. 556), and citingRawls and Walzer in support, few contemporary political theorists wouldwish to draw such a sharp line between common opinion and theoreticaltruth. Most would claim in one way or another to incorporate andsystematize existing beliefs about justice in their theoretical constructions.Indeed for Miller himself, empirical evidence should play a significantrole in justifying a normative theory of justice, or to put it another way . . .such a theory is to be tested, in part, by its correspondence with our evidenceconcerning everyday beliefs about justice (1994, p. 177).


I can think of three ways in which empirical research into the justice-beliefs held by lay social actors might be thought important to politicalphilosophy. In increasing order of strength, they are first, that such beliefs,and knowledge of their causal determinants, provide food for thought;second, that they constitute feasibility constraints on the realisation of thephilosophically justifiable distribution; and third, that they are constitutiveof that distribution itself.

The first, so weak as to be uncontroversial, is simply that knowingthat others, perhaps the great majority of others, think differently givesthe philosopher grounds for caution. Elster (1992, p. 193) observes thatthe knowledge that others hold or practice very different conceptionsshould make him scrutinize his own opinions with extra care, and haselsewhere (1995, pp. 9495) suggested that Frolich and Oppenheimers(1992) finding that truncated utilitarianism maximising total welfaresubject to a floor constraint on individual welfare is overwhelmingly themost popular distribution actually chosen by people in a situationsimulating Rawls veil of ignorance, gives philosophers reason to accordit more careful consideration than it has received hitherto. On this account,they may still end up rejecting popular opinion, but at least it will havebeen treated with appropriate respect.

If descriptive studies can play this cautionary role, then research intothe factors that explain why people believe what they do about distributivejustice can and should be similarly thought-provoking. For example, wheresociological research reveals that people are inclined to favour principlesthat correspond to their self-interest, then philosophers whose own viewsseem to reflect this process should think again. Of course, they may cometo the same conclusions: as Elster (1995, p. 94) acknowledges, correlationsof this kind are not sufficient to invalidate arguments. But one does nothave time to question all of ones intuitions equally carefully, and empiricalresearch of an explanatory kind can help the philosopher identify thosemost worthy of suspicion.

Descriptive and explanatory empirical research can, then, be helpful forthe normative project but this role remains merely external. There is nosuggestion here that what other people think, or even why they think it,can do more than give the philosopher reason cautiously to reconsider herown arguments and intuitions. The second reason why empirical researchmight be of interest to the political theorist continues to adopt this externalattitude, but holds that lay beliefs matter insofar as they constitute the causalfield that confronts his or her attempts to guide action. Conceptions ofjustice that fail sufficiently to correspond to ordinary thinking are doomed

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to failure, however sound they may be in philosophical terms, for, as Dunn(1980, p. 247) observes, if historical agents are to be provided with reasonsfor acting, they must be furnished with reasons which are reasons for them(italics in original). The bounds of political possibility are to a great extentset by popular opinion, so that judging what can be done politically requiresknowledge of that opinion. Add to this the claim that it makes little senseto advocate that which it is impossible to achieve, or that there is reason tobe concerned with the set of feasible outcomes given the status quo, andone has a variety of moral arguments for why political theorists shouldtake lay beliefs into account. We need not regard those beliefs as makingany difference to the truth about justice, for our conclusion may well besimply that justice is unattainable and will remain so while popular opinionremains as it is, but there is reason to take them into account when offeringprescriptions here and now.

The third argument as to why popular beliefs might bear on politicalphilosophies of justice is the rather stronger one that the distributiveprinciples that are justified for the society in question may be internallyrelated to lay beliefs themselves. Where the second argument regardsthose beliefs merely as constraints upon the feasibility of achieving a justsociety, and the justification of principles of justice as occurring quiteindependently of popular beliefs, this third argument claims that suchbeliefs are in some sense constitutive of a proper understanding of whatjustice demands.

Three versions of this third line of argument can be identified, rangingfrom the weak and unobjectionable, through the substantial and interesting,to the strong and mistaken. The weak and unobjectionable version saysthat the philosopher who talks about justice needs to make sure that she istalking about that which is conventionally referred to by the word justice.This is indeed an empirical issue, decidable only by attention to the wayin which the term, and its derivatives, are actually used, in particular byattention to those commonplaces that are so commonplace as to becandidates for a priori truths (Jackson and Pettit 1995). A philosopher whooffers her theory of justice with no claim that it should motivate those towhom it is addressed, or who offers it as a theory of how one should behaveto avoid embarrassment, for example, has not understood what the termmeans. There is, of course, room for philosophical argument as to whichcommonplaces are indeed a priori truths, but the question of whichstatements are commonplaces would seem to be an empirical matter. Thisclaim, then, makes popular beliefs about justice constitutive of thephilosophically correct view about justice in the sense that they indicate


what it is for a belief to be a belief about justice, and not, for example,about charity, or etiquette. One way of seeing how weak and unobjection-able this sense is is to notice that both Nozick and Rawls, despite the hugedifferences in the content of their theories, satisfy the requirement to attendto the grammar of justice.

The substantial and interesting version of the constitutive claim notesthat principles of justice may give some weight to what people think isjust even where the principles themselves have been justified in ways thatmake no reference to what people think. For example, it is plausible to hold,as a principle of justice, that peoples legitimate expectations constitutevalid claims to reward, or at least that they should be given some weightin judging what distributive outcomes are just. Even someone who regardsconventional desert claims as mistaken may acknowledge that the fact thata persons actions have been informed by the belief that they are valid, ina context where all or most other relevant actors believe the same, ispertinent to the question of what she should get as a matter of justice. Tothe extent that judging a persons legitimate expectations depends onknowing what she and others believe about justice, justice beliefs willclearly be relevant information for anyone deciding what distributiveoutcomes are just. What people think is just, then, may enter into whatjustice requires, not via the claim that what they think is constitutive ofcorrect principles of justice but via the claim that there is independent moralreason - a principle of justice justified independently of popular opinion -to give those views some weight.

The first two versions of the constitutive claim gives popular beliefs arole, first in determining what it is for something to be a theory of justice,and, second, when combined with a principle giving some weight to popularbeliefs, in making a difference to what justice requires. The third, andstrongest, version, gives popular opinion a role in determining the contentof principles of justice themselves. This is the claim that part of the answerto the question of what principles should govern the distribution of goodsin a society is to be found by looking at the way that ordinary people thinkthat they ought to be distributed. It is in this direction that recent work inpolitical philosophy has taken a turn.

Or so it might seem. In fact, as I will now argue, although the justificatorystrategies adopted by theorists such as Walzer and Rawls are rathercomplicated, it is fairly clear that neither gives any genuinely constitutiverole to popular beliefs about distributive justice. Miller is the theorist whoclaims the greatest weight for popular opinion, and indeed for publicopinion as that is revealed by surveys, but even his stated methodology

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seems to me to leave more of a gap between the philosopher and the publicthan he himself recognises.

Let me start with Walzer, whose claim (1983, p. 9) that all distributionsare just or unjust relative to the social meanings of the goods at stake, andwhose stated aim of interpreting to his fellow citizens the meanings thathe and they share, are probably the best-known examples of this apparentlyempirical turn. When we look at Walzers justification of his proclaimedmethod, we find two distinct arguments. One is quasi-conceptual andsomewhat relativistic: goods mean different things in different societies,the proper distribution of a good is one in accordance with its socialmeaning, and there is no cross-cultural basis on which to criticise a societysunderstandings of its goods. The other is democratic: it is respect for laybeliefs that requires the philosopher to accord them moral weight. If oneunderstands politics and political theory as in the business of respondingto citizens wills, then what matters is not so much the independentphilosophical validity (rightness) of citizens beliefs, but the fact that theyare theirs (Walzer 1981). Although Walzer does not seem to notice this,the quasi-conceptual and somewhat relativistic argument and the democraticargument are quite different. It is one thing to take shared meanings to beconstitutive of justice because one lacks a basis for criticism, quite anotherto give them constitutive weight out of a respect for those who share them.7

Now it is noticeable that in Spheres of Justice Walzer puts this secondargument somewhat differently. There (1983, p. 314, p. 320) he does notmention democracy, but says that what guides his approach is a decentrespect for the opinions of mankind, and he grounds this respect in theclaim that it is as culture-producing creatures that we are one anothersequals. This change of formulation is significant, for it suggests that Walzeris uncomfortable using an argument familiar from democratic theory insupport of a method supposed to yield principles of justice. And un-comfortable he should be, for making the democratic case for respectingthe views of ones fellow citizens, or those of another culture, even wherethose views are mistaken, is surely different from regarding those viewsas constitutive of justice itself. One may very well accept the democraticlegitimacy of distributions that reflect popular opinion without being at

7 Rorty is similarly ambiguous. Although he argues that there is no way to arrive atprinciples of justice other than by what he calls (1990, p. 287) a historico-sociologicaldescription of the way we live now, he does so in a paper asserting the priority ofdemocracy to philosophy, which suggests that he too can plausibly be read as arguing thedemocratic, rather than the anti-foundationalist, case for heeding the beliefs of his fellowcitizens. For a fuller discussion of Rortys views on these issues, see Mulhall and Swift(1996, pp. 259275)


all tempted to regard that opinion as constitutive of the right answer as towhat distributive justice demands.8 (For discussion of the so-called paradoxof democracy see Wollheim (1962) and Estlund (1989)). Research intopublic opinion might thus be important on democratic grounds the firstopinion pollsters conceived their work in just such terms, as do those whoadvocate more sophisticated methods (Fishkin 1995) and in this way thefindings of empirical research (though not necessarily of social surveys)might indeed be of significance to the normative political theorist concernedwith legitimacy. But this need not be to grant its findings any constitutiverole in a theory of distributive justice. 9

This crucial distinction between justice and legitimacy also helps inthe understanding of Rawls attitude to popular opinion, though here thingsare yet more complicated if perhaps less confused than they were inWalzers case. Where Rorty interprets Rawls claim that his theory ofjustice is political and not metaphysical as showing how liberal democracycan get along without philosophical presuppositions, requiring only historyand sociology (1990, p. 284), in fact Rawls adopts a variant of the positionthat holds that we have moral reason to give weight to the beliefs thatcitizens hold, or can hold, in common. Rawls claim is that we should takeseriously certain fundamental ideas seen as implicit in the public politicalculture of a democratic society, not simply because they represent the

8 It may be the right answer as to what procedural justice demands. If one holds thatwhat makes a decision legitimate is that it is the outcome of a just procedure, then onewill accept the legitimacy of a distribution precisely because it satisfies the demands ofthis kind of justice. But it remains the case that the answer can be the wrong one in thesense I am discussing. Just as the verdict of a jury has legitimacy even if it gets it wrong,so an ideal democracy might generate decisions on distributive matters that are legiti-mate (because the outcome of a just procedure) while being quite mistaken about thedemands of distributive justice. This paper is concerned with beliefs about, and theirrelation to the justification of, principles of distributive justice stricto sensu. It is, how-ever, worth pointing out that peoples beliefs about legitimacy - or about what makes aprocedure just - can themselves be mistaken. If we have reason to regard citizens mis-taken decisions about distributive justice as legitimate, this is because of a correct analy-sis of what makes a decision legitimate and not because of what they think makes adecision legitimate. I am grateful to Michael Smith for discussion on this point.

9 Two further questions cannot be pursued here. First, what kind of public opinion -how post-deliberation? how philosophically educated? - is relevant for legitimacy? Sec-ond, to what extent (and hence by what institutional means) does legitimacy requirepopular opinion to be accommodated? One might think that conventional liberal demo-cratic processes give sufficient weight to the right kind of popular opinion, with politicalparties being effectively constrained by their desire for re-election to attend to the find-ings of opinion polls and focus groups. Or one might argue for a greater role for refer-enda, or for citizens juries and deliberative polls, and so on.

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way we live now, but rather because we have reason to value a societythat is publicly justifiable to its members. Baldly summarising a complexargument, what Rawls (1993) actually argues is that, since political poweris the exercise of power held by free and equal citizens, that exercise isonly legitimate when it is used in ways that can be justified by appeal topublic reason; the importance of public justifiability leads the politicaltheorist to societys main institutions, and their accepted forms ofinterpretation . . . seen as a fund of implicitly shared ideas and principles(1993, p. 1314); the idea of society as a fair scheme of cooperationbetween free and equal citizens is such an idea, which is articulated byRawls in terms of the imaginative construct of the original position; andfrom that device of representation emerges a substantive theory ofdistributive justice.

This, then, is a distinct, and much more fully articulated, variant of thelegitimacy argument strands of which we detected in Walzer. It too can bethought of as invoking a proper respect for peoples beliefs, but here therespect is not shown simply by giving the people what they will as it ison the democratic view but by insisting that the use of state coercion ispublicly justifiable to them. This is the liberal principle of legitimacy.As Rawls puts it (1993, p. 137), our exercise of political power is fullyproper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution theessentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expectedto endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their commonhuman reason. Rawls is thus led to espouse a methodology constraininghim to the working up of ideas implicit in our public political culture byhis distinctively liberal understanding of the proper relation between theindividual and the state. And unlike Walzer, Rawls does not confuse thedemands of legitimacy with those of justice. That is why he can continueto argue for the justice of justice as fairness, difference principle and all,whilst recognising that other liberal political conceptions of justice cansatisfy the demands of public reason and hence be legitimate (Estlund1996).10

So: it is one thing to regard the beliefs of a societys members aboutprinciples of justice as constitutive of the kinds of principle that may

10 There is another strand of argument in Rawls that emphasises the importance ofstability, and this might seem to give him a further reason to care about popular opinion.The proper role of stability considerations in Rawls argument is more complicated thancan adequately be discussed here (see Mulhall and Swift 1996, pp. 240242), but forpresent purposes it is sufficient to note that to the extent that they constitute a genuinelydistinct strand of reasoning they have to do with feasibility.


legitimately regulate their society, but it is quite another to regard thosebeliefs as constitutive of the right answer as to what principles of justiceare correct for that society. This distinction, between principles beingjustified as legitimate principles to govern the distribution of benefits andburdens in a society and their being justified as correct principles of justice,may seem pedantic, but it is one recognised by all who acknowledge thejustifiability, on grounds of legitimacy, of laws that they themselves regard,and would vote against, as unjust. Walzer veers between a conceptual anda democratic version of the legitimacy argument, and seems, mistakenly,to regard both as implying that his method of attending to shared socialmeanings is a way of justifying principles of justice. Rawls is clearer onthe distinction between justice and legitimacy, and offers a version of thelatter that attends less to what people currently believe than to what can bejustified to them in appropriate terms.

Despite this analysis, it remains worth investigating how these positionsrelate to empirical research of the kind discussed above. To what extentare the things that Rawls and Walzer would have political philosophersconsider really empirical peoples empirical beliefs about distributivejustice? The answer is very little.

In Walzers case, it is crucial to his overall position though notobviously consistent with his own methodological injunctions that hecan distinguish between the social meaning of a good, and the opinionsthat people currently have about how it should be distributed. That is whyhe can defend his approach as compatible with radical social criticism. Heknows, for example, that many of his fellow Americans think it quite properfor health care to be on sale in the market, and his argument against thisview in fact relies upon a claim about the distributive logic of the practiceof medicine and the inconsistency involved in a societys permitting amarket whilst simultaneously recognizing health care to be a need,evidenced by the use of communal funds to finance research, buildhospitals, underwrite the treatment of the very old, and so on (Walzer 1983,p. 86, p. 90). As Warnke (1992, p. 18) puts it social meaning is not a matterof the opinion individuals may have about goods, institutions and practices;it is a matter of the goods, institutions and practices themselves about whichindividuals have opinions. Walzers decent respect for the opinions ofmankind turns out to have little to do what social scientists usually regardas public opinion.

Where Walzer claims to be providing a reading of the way we understandparticular goods in our society, Rawlss text is that much vaguer thing hecalls the public political culture, and he is less concerned with peoplescurrent beliefs than with what can be justified to them by appeal to

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common human reason. While knowledge of others intuitions aboutjustice can perhaps help in the process of reaching reflective equilibrium,by providing food for thought as discussed above, and while it matters thatjustice be presented as an articulation of implicitly shared ideas andprinciples, it is clear that he takes his commitment to public justifiabilityto be consistent with conclusions that are a long way from the beliefs ofmost Americans. This is most obvious in the case of desert, to which Rawlsis notoriously hostile, but which the great majority of US citizens endorse.11

Does Rawls fail to follow through on his own methodological in-junctions? In Millers view (1994, pp. 181182), fulfilling the Rawlsiancommitment to public justifiability requires greater attention to empiricalevidence than is paid by Rawls himself. While it is possible to distinguishbetween what people now believe about justice and that which can bejustified using only commonly accepted modes of argument, it is im-plausible to think that the two will differ radically. For these kinds ofargument are going to be just the familiar correction of empirical error, offaulty inference, of the distorting effect of self-interest, which cannot beexpected to lead to beliefs that contrast markedly with those already current.For Miller, if we really care about producing a theory that can be justifiedto all citizens, then we have to know what those citizens currently believe,and our conclusions can only be their beliefs corrected in commonsensicalways. 12

It is not obvious, however, that restricting the philosopher to the publiclyjustifiable correction of popular opinion entails that his conclusions willbe similar in content to that opinion, as Miller seems to suggest, for it is atleast possible that that opinion itself rests upon faulty inference of the kindthat can be demonstrated publicly. We can grant that a theory of justiceshould be understood as bringing out the deep structure of a set of everydaybeliefs which, on the surface, are to some degree ambiguous, confused,contradictory (Miller 1994, p. 177) but insist that this may lead us a long

11 As has been argued elsewhere (Mulhall and Swift 1996, pp. 242245) there is acrucial ambiguity in Rawls notion of public justifiability. In one sense, what can bepublicly justifiable is that which appeals to the public political culture as implicitlyshared. But in another, it amounts to that which, given the burdens of judgment, itwould be unreasonable to reject. I focus on the first of these two senses in the text be-cause it is that which would seem to accord greater importance to public opinion.

12 Where Miller criticises Rawls for not paying sufficient attention to popular opinion,Gaus (1996, pp. 131136) regards Rawls endorsement of the accessibility condition -that public justifications must rely on methods of reasoning accessible to others, in par-ticular commonsense reasoning - as committing him to an excessively populist theory ofjustification. For Gaus, commonsense reasoning is prone to error, and indeed seems to beinconsistent with the attitude to disagreement that Rawls himself regards as reasonable.


way from the content of mass empirical opinion. Empirical opinion aboutdistributive justice might be respected, on this view, in the sense thatarguments are presented as publicly justifiable corrections to it, but anyplausible account of what public justification amounts to will leave thephilosopher plenty of room to argue against public opinion as that isconventionally understood.

5. THE EXAMPLE OF DESERT

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this point is to consider the most glaringcase of a discrepancy between lay beliefs about justice on the one hand,and those endorsed by political philosophers on the other. As severaltheorists have recently noted, it is on the question of desert that (to quoteMiller again) much of the recent theorizing about justice appears to beout step with popular opinion (1991, p. 372). According to Scheffler(1992), for example, it is the rejection by contemporary philosophicalliberalism of traditional notions of desert and responsibility that remainwidely held in the general population that goes at least some way towardsexplaining the failure of liberalism as a concrete political programme.Galston (1991, pp. 159162) too has argued that Rawls account of justicefails to provide the most plausible description of the shared understandingof Americas public culture, since there is in the contemporary UnitedStates a broad consensus that, amongst other things, regards desert as aproper basis of distribution, and ability, effort and self-denial as the basesof desert. Again this is thought to have political implications, since theinadequacies of Rawls dangerously one-sided reconstruction of the liberaltradition are mirrored in the national electoral disasters of contemporaryliberalism.

On the first of three possibilities outlined above, this discrepancybetween public and professional opinion is no more than a reason for thephilosopher to think again, and to check his or her arguments. Respect forlay beliefs might perhaps lead to a reconsideration of intuitions, or a lookat the variables with which the rejection of desert commonly correlates inorder to consider whether they might explain the philosophical positionin a way that competes with its validity. For Galston (1991, p. 159) thematter should end here, for his view is not only that the Rawlsian analysisfails to fit public opinion but also that it does violence to a reasonableaccount of the moral point of view. Suppose, however, that, havingreconsidered, the philosopher continues to reject that traditional thinkingabout responsibility and agency that underlies the belief in desert. Scheffler(1992, p. 319), indeed, is keen to make clear his own view that liberals

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may well be right to be sceptical of such thinking. This leaves the moreinteresting second and third reasons to take such (ex hypothesi mistaken)opinion into account. On one, the people may be wrong about desert, butare ignored at the cost of morally serious political isolation and in-consequence. On the other, the popular affirmation of desert helps to justifydistributions that accord with its requirements.

Taking the latter first, no position we have discussed holds thatdistributions in accordance with traditional desert claims are just simplybecause people think they are. The theorist who would have us pay greatestattention to empirical opinion is Miller, for whom taking public justifiabilityseriously means that justice can only be popular opinion corrected bycommonly accepted modes of reasoning. But how should we apply thatclaim to this case? It is at least arguable that the philosophers rejection oftraditional desert claims, or at least some of them, itself depends only uponforms of argument that are widely regarded as acceptable. The idea thatwe cannot deserve greater (or lesser) rewards than others for the exerciseof abilities for the greater (or lesser) possession of which we are notresponsible is commonsensical, and the claim that at least some of ourdifferential talents are ours by chance is surely uncontroversial. Some ofcontemporary liberalisms hostility to desert claims - that component which,in denying even that we deserve to be rewarded for our efforts, perhapsdoes rest upon a controversial claim about human agency - may not survivethe filter of public justification. But there are other purported desert bases,such as innate differences, that could be rejected on the basis of nothingmore than common sense.

In the case of desert, then, it seems that even the philosopher limited tothe task of the publicly justifiable correction of popular opinion may, paceMiller, argue for a position that differs radically from it. The demands ofpublic justifiability may rule out certain kinds of philosophical argument,and what the people think may enter into the process of justification in thatthe philosopher must understand, and present herself to be systematising andbringing out the deep structure latent within popular beliefs. But the extentof the ambiguity, confusion and inconsistency in those beliefs is sufficientto leave a great deal of work to be done, work that may well lead toconclusions differing markedly in content not only from empirical publicopinion understood as those beliefs that survey research shows to beregularly and consensually endorsed by the vast majority of ordinary peoplebut also from the more reflective beliefs that would result from the researchmethod advocated earlier in this paper.

Clearly there is a great deal more to be said on the questions of whatpublic justification amounts to and whether we should indeed care that our


theory satisfies its demands.13 Leaving behind such complexities, let meturn finally to the alternative, strategic, suggestion that arguing the truthabout desert where this conflicts with popular opinion may produce, indeedaccording to Scheffler and Galston has produced, sub-optimal politicaloutcomes. Here it is tempting to distinguish between the role of thephilosopher, who can properly transcend such consequentialist con-siderations, and that of the political actor, who, on some views at least, isirrevocably caught up in them. (For the classic treatment of this issue, seeWeber (1948)). While it is a nice question for a political party, say, whetherit should include in its manifesto commitments to policies that it believesjust but unpopular, or argue for what it knows to be unjust in one sphere inorder to gain the power to bring about justice in others, the philosophermight claim that such problems are not hers. Her trade is the pursuit andadvertisement of truth, and the likelihood of others coming to agree withher conclusions matters not one jot. Or, if she is unwilling to abjureconsequentialist considerations altogether, she can point out that, while onecan imagine scientific cases where the consequences of knowing orpublishing truths were so likely to be so harmful that the scientist might,on balance, have reason to desist from their pursuit or publication, it seemsless plausible that the same should apply to moral truths. (See Greenawalt(1995) for an interesting discussion).

That said, philosophers may wish to justify their philosophising on themore positive consequentialist ground that arguing for the moral truth islikely, in the long run, to bring about better outcomes than would otherwisebe achieved. Rather than taking the feasible set as given, it might be thoughtthat it is precisely the task of the philosopher to change that set, by changingthe content of those popular beliefs that do so much to determine it. Thisis at the very least a widespread understanding of the proper role of thepolitical philosopher, and from this perspective the finding that most peoplemistakenly believe in conventional desert claims does not give one reasoneven of a consequentialist kind to pander to that opinion.

13 What of the philosopher who believes that conventional desert claims are mistakenbut who accepts that this cannot be demonstrated in publicly acceptable ways - that itrelies on controversial but valid forms of argument? Presumably she can, in private lifeas it were, preach and seek to persuade others of the truth; but, on the position presentedhere, cannot consider this part of a conception of justice or vote for it. It should be clearthat this is not Rawls own position. He thinks that the fact that conventional desertclaims are mistaken can be shown by appeal to public reason, and hence voted for, butaccepts that other conceptions of justice, more sympathetic to such desert claims, canalso be justified in this way and so must be regarded as legitimate.

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Of course, this particular defence of philosophical immunity fromempirical opinion relies upon a social-scientific prediction about the extentto which arguing for the truth will have the effect of bringing others tobelieve it. Clearly time frames are crucially important people may believein 200 years what it would be crazy to expect them to come to believe inthe next decade and the philosopher defending her radical detachmenton consequentialist grounds will need to take seriously the moral con-siderations that they throw up. But the philosopher who cares aboutchanging the minds of those she addresses, rather than those generationsdown the line, may well feel it necessary to heed the findings of empiricalresearch, both descriptive and explanatory. For what beliefs can plausiblybe changed to depends both on what they currently are and on the causalprocesses that determine their formation. The philosopher must knowfrom where it is that her strategy of change is to start and worry aboutthe causal factors that help to determine its likely success. What if, forexample, people would not (and could not) stop believing in traditionalnotions of desert even when their mistake was pointed out to them(Strawson 1974)? What is needed, on this view, is a research programmethat seeks to assess the efficacy of (good) reasons in the formation ofpeoples justice beliefs or, if that sounds an implausibly Utopian project,at least one that focusses on the mechanisms by which such beliefs areformed and can be changed.

Notice, moreover, that the strategic attitude to empirical beliefs aboutdistributive justice takes it for granted that such beliefs really are part ofthe causal field that is to be confronted and negotiated. Unlike theconstitutive accounts, which give moral weight to citizens beliefs or whatcan be justified to them simply in virtue of their being believed orjustifiable, the strategic perspective only gives one reason to care aboutwhat people think if that influences their actions. If people do not act tosupport (or resist) what they believe to be just (or unjust), then there canbe little reason, from this perspective, to take their declared views intoaccount. This particular consequentialist defence of philosophical lack ofattention to current public opinion requires not only that the philosopherbe able to convert disbelievers, but also that the truths to which they areconverted are such as to motivate action. To be sure, some may choose toignore consequentialist considerations altogether, and others may care onlythat people come to believe the truth about justice, not that they aremotivated to act on that truth. But empirical investigation, not only of thelikelihood of people coming to believe the truth about justice but also ofthe extent to which their beliefs about justice have motivational force,


would seem to be of interest to all but the most other-worldly of philo-sophers concerned with the demands of distributive justice.

6. CONCLUSION

If this paper has a single overall message, it is that deciding the properrelation between social-scientific and philosophical analyses of distributivejustice requires us to be very careful about what is meant by principles ofdistributive justice. Such principles are a rather specific and abstract subsetof moral considerations. This is a point against those social scientists whoequate beliefs about justice with all normative beliefs about distributivequestions, or who fail to see that different principles of justice may yieldthe same judgment as to the justice of a particular distribution. Becausethey are such distinctive things, social scientists may not, on reflection,consider them particularly important. For example, it is an open empiricalquestion to what extent peoples actions are best explained by their beliefsabout principles of justice.

But it is also a point against those political philosophers who, failing todistinguish between justice and legitimacy, overstate the constitutive roleof popular beliefs in relation to the former. What the people think (or arelikely to come to think) justice requires is important for reasons offeasibility at least to the extent that what people think about justice affectswhat they do. It matters also constitutively only if and because we holdmoral principles that give weight to what they think in deciding whatdistributions are legitimate. The principle of legitimate expectations cap-tures this at one level, the principle of democratic legitimacy does so atanother. In both cases these principles are not justified by appeal to popularopinion. Popular beliefs about distributive justice are indeed importantfactors for the political philosopher to take into account, but for reasonsof feasibility or legitimacy, not because they play any role in the justificationof principles of distributive justice.

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