Normative Behaviourism: From Observation to Justification

This chapter defends ‘normative behaviourism’ against ‘mentalism’, the mainstream approach in political philosophy whereby principles are justified by appealing to the philosopher’s intuitions. In contrast, normative behaviourism justifies political principles by reference to the behavioural responses they provoke when put into practice, in particular those negative responses—such as insurrection and crime—that signal resistance to prevailing institutions. Arguing that how people behave provides more reliable evidence about what really matters to them than what they say, the author defends normative behaviourism against two main charges: that we cannot understand what behaviour means to people without also knowing what they are thinking and that observed behaviour may be manipulated or ideologically conditioned. The chapter concludes that to avoid the second charge, behaviourism may have to become more experimental in the sense of discovering how people react when exposed to previously untried policies or forms of decision-making.