I’m participating in a conference on “Markets, Justice, and the Law” at the end of the month. The theme of the conference is in part to examine where the social sciences and political philosophy tend to go wrong. I’m writing a short piece for discussion about some of the pathologies of political philosophy. Here’s my brief take on training:

Part of the problem has to be with the training political philosophers receive.

The average political philosopher is a life-long student, with little experience in the outside world. Most begin work on the Ph.D. immediately after finishing a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.

An interesting fact about political philosophy: You can obtain a Ph.D. in political philosophy from a top-ranked institution without ever having taken a course in the social sciences. To get a Ph.D. in political philosophy, from a philosophy department, there is normally no requirement or expectation that you will take a single course in economics, political science, sociology, law, history, or anthropology. Instead, you will just take classes in the history of philosophy, symbolic logic, meta-ethics, normative ethics, and epistemology. (Now, many political philosophy graduate students took some survey courses in the social sciences as undergraduates, but if they are like most undergraduates, they will have forgotten most of that material. At any rate, their graduate advisors will not test them to see if they remember any of it.)

The people who evaluate your work, from your dissertation advisors to the referees at the journals to which you submit, probably will have had little to no exposure to the empirical social sciences since their first or second year of college. You could thus continue to possess the same unexamined opinions about social scientific matters that you had as an uneducated high school student. You might subscribe to a bunch of well-known mistakes about social scientific matters, and yet no one on your dissertation committee will notice or attempt to correct you.

If you are writing a dissertation in political philosophy, say on the question of whether markets are just, there is no requirement or expectation that you have even a basic grasp of economic theory. In fact, you could employ premises from economic theories that economists dismiss as bogus—such as Marxism—without detriment. You could write a book on, say, whether property rights conceptually depend on certain political institutions without ever having read empirical work on the actual historical development of property rights or commercial law. You could write at length about, say, why compulsory voting will save the world, in complete ignorance of the vast empirical literature on compulsory voting.

I’ve got to cash this out later in the piece by providing specific examples of why this training leads us astray. But I leave this here with you for discussion.