The idea of philosophical fieldwork: global justice, moral ignorance, intellectual attitudes

This article is about the idea of philosophical fieldwork as a possible corrective to our current state of ignorance regarding the thoughts and views of distant others in the context of global normative theorising. By ‘philosophical fieldwork’ I mean a type of conceptual discovery — philosophical as non-empirical fieldwork. By ‘distant others’ I do not mean the ‘global poor’ but our academic peers who work within moral and political contexts distinct from ours and whom we tend not to consult in our global theorising: distant intellectually as much as geographically.