  As it happened, these events coincided with another development, namely the “public turn” in philosophy. For several decades Anglo-American philosophy had treated moral and political questions obliquely. On the prevailing view, philosophers were suited only to do “conceptual analysis”—they could lay bare, for example, the conceptual architecture of the idea of justice, but they were not competent to suggest political principles, constitutional arrangements, or social policies that actually did justice.  Philosophers might do “meta-ethics” but not “normative ethics.” This viewed collapsed in the 1970s under the weight of two counter-blows. First, John Rawls published in 1971 A Theory of Justice, an elaborate, elegant, and inspiring defense of a normative theory of justice (Rawls 1971). Second, in the same year Philosophy &amp; Public Affairs, with Princeton University’s impeccable pedigree, began life, a few months after Florida State’s Social Theory and Practice. These journals, along with a re-tooled older periodical, Ethics, became self-conscious platforms for socially and politically engaged philosophical writing, born out of the feeling that in time of war (the Vietnam War) and social tumult (the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation), philosophers ought to do, not simply talk about, ethics.  In 1973, Philosophy &amp; Public Affairs published Thomas Nagel’s “Equal Treatment and Compensatory Justice” (Nagel 1973) and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “Preferential Hiring” (Thomson 1973), and the philosophical literature on affirmative action burgeoned  forth.[3]