April 2020

In many countries over the world, working parents are now full-time caring for their children, often also teaching them, or helping them to stay focused and sufficiently organized to get their homework done. In many places the kids (and their parents) are for the most time locked up in their apartments or houses, which doesn’t always help to keep spirits lifted and to give kids possibilities to get rid of excess energies…

Since surely this must have led to funny, surprising, difficult or sad situations, let’s have an open thread to share your adventures. Simply responding that you think it is utterly exhausting trying to do two jobs at the same time, is also allowed :)

So here’s an idea I’d like to float in our virtual common room. In the last 10-20 years, there has been a lot of discussion in contemporary normative political philosophers on methods. Yet in my view, methods are always depending on the aim/goal/function of the analysis one wants to do. So, what is the work we are doing aiming at, exactly? The work of that part of political philosophy does different things, including spelling out what normative notions mean (conceptual work), developing theories of certain values (e.g. a theory of justice, a theory of freedom as non-domination), developing theories on particular problems (e.g. a theory arguing for open borders), and of course, many of us spend a lot of our energies showing that certain arguments other philosophers advance in pursuing the above research agenda’s are wrong, or have shortcomings and how these could be fixed; or whether the many views and reasons advanced in this kind of research are philosophically distinct, i.e. whether they cannot be reduced to a more fundamental reason given for a certain view.

But one could also do philosophical work in this tradition whereby one is, as a philosopher, firstly, not explicitly introducing one’s own values to this debate; yet, secondly, one is nevertheless trying to provide a constructive input for politics (public policy making and the democratic debate), and, thirdly, one is not coming up with a specific recommendation for a policy or an institutional change, but instead making some less specific recommendations.

We could call this method a ‘normative audit’ (or ‘ethical audit’ might also work, but let’s proceed with one name). How would this work?
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