Nowadays democratic liberal societies face a rising challenge in terms of fragmentation and erosion of shared values and ethical pluralism. Democracy is not anymore grounded in the possibility of a common understanding and interpretation of the same values. Neverthless, legal and political philosophy continue to focus on how to reach consensus, especially through monist, objectualist, contractualist, discursive and deliberative approaches, rather than openly affording the issue of disagreement. Far from being just a disruptive force, disagreement and conflict are matters of (...) fact that no reflection on democracy can underevaluate. They are the major issues through which to look at the intersection of law, politics and morals. The inclusion of dissent is a powerful tool for moral recognition of different understandings of justice. That is where legal procedures become crucial. Law is a fundamental element in the building of a democracy. But it is also particularly exposed to disagreement. Language indeterminacy, dogmatic concepts and value pluralism constitute the main elements that lead to alternative and conflicting interpretations of law in a democratic framework. Major legal progress in the past has come from different understandings of the same legal materials. In this article I argue that respect for disagreement should be a moral principle in democracy and that the role of legal disagreement is essential to understand the evolution and the future directions of democracy as the government of a political community. To do so, a link between respect for disagreement and legal interpretation and argumentation must be established in order to make room for reason and avoid extreme skepticism on the contribution of law to the enforcement of democracy. (shrink)

Scholars have long recognized the existence of myriad widespread deep disagreements on values, justice, morality, and ethics. In order to come to terms with such deep disagreements, resistant to rational solution, this article asserts the need for developing an ethics of disagreement. The reality that theoretical disagreements often turn into practical conflicts is a major justification for why such an ethics is necessary. This paper outlines an ethics of deep disagreement that is primarily conceived of as a form of virtue (...) ethics. Such an ethics asks opposing parties in moral and intellectual conflicts to acknowledge that (a) deep disagreements exist, (b) opposing positions should be recognized as worthy of respect, and that (c) one should seek dialogue and mutual understanding. This ethical approach conceives of toleration as a moral and political virtue and presents an argument for toleration based on deep disagreements. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to offer guidelines to deal with hard choices, specifically in situations where some compromise among opposing values is inescapable. The guidelines are intended to help ethicists and practitioners to delineate different alternatives and to dismiss some of them as morally unacceptable. This article explores the view that compromises arise from negotiations but from ethical predicaments as well. For this reason, I distinguish between strategic and moral compromises. Both managers and employees are individual moral agents (...) who have to confront the possibility of unpalatable and even disgusting compromises, so that they are forced to put their integrity into risk in certain compromise situations. However, I shall argue for the possibility of palatable moral compromises. The guidelines to cope with those situations and to identify the unpalatable compromises are based on J. S. Mill's moral philosophy. Mill suggested that half-measures passed in Parliament must have certain key elements to be morally acceptable. I make use of this doctrine to put forward compromise guidelines in the form of a set of hallmarks, internal and external elements of palatable compromises. Two minicases are used to test the guidelines and to emphasize the importance of compromises for ethical decision making and commitment to company. (shrink)

Constitution is an exclusive legal document, and its interpretation is a process – a continuous work of explanation of its content, the end and qualitative perfection of which may only be considered taking into account the limits of intellectual potential of the particular time. The interpretation of constitution is a permanent process, which is influenced and determined by plenty of conceptual factors. Firstly the supreme juridical power of the constitution as well as its integrity determines the opportunities of its interpreter (...) and applier. Integrity of the constitution is considered to be the legal, philosophical, logical integrity of its norms, which determines an obligation of its interpreter to perceive this legal act as an integral unit, i.e. not only as a catalogue of particular values, but also as a balance of these values. All the constitutional expressis verbis provisions are equal in its’ juridical power, that is why they do not negate each other, on the contrary – each of them only complement others’ content. Besides, it is important to mention that exceptional juridical power of the constitution determines its interpretational self-sufficiency. Constitution can not be interpreted invoking the content of the acts of lower juridical power. (shrink)

This volume analyzes and studies how vagueness occurs and matters as a specific problem in the context of theories that are primarily about something else.

The debate on political constitutionalism has entirely neglected the constitution-making dimension. This is probably due to the fact that constitution-making usually brings with it undesirable outcomes such as the entrenchment of rights or structures. These outcomes do not respect reasonable disagreement among citizens because they violate the only fair system for settling disagreement: majority rule and equal voting rights. This article argues that political constitutionalists may regret the absence of any claim about constitution-making. Either they are overlooking certain problems inherent (...) to the electoral process that is supposed to tackle disagreement or, even worse, they are downplaying the entrenching effect of ordinary political processes by ignoring the redemptive properties of constituent power. In both cases, their claims undermine the political dimension of constitutionalism. (shrink)

I aim to explain why majority voting can be assumed to have an epistemic edge over lottery voting. This would provide support for majority voting as the appropriate decision mechanism for deliberative epistemic accounts of democracy. To argue my point, I first recall the usual arguments for majority voting: maximal decisiveness, fairness as anonymity, and minimal decisiveness. I then show how these arguments are over inclusive as they also support lottery voting. I then present a framework to measure accuracy so (...) as to compare the two decision mechanisms. I go over four arguments for lottery voting and three arguments for majority voting that support their respective accuracy. Lottery voting is then shown to have, compared to majority voting, a decreased probability of discrimination. That is, I argue that with lottery voting it is less probable under conditions of normal politics that if the procedure selects X, X is reasonable. I then provide two case scenarios for each voting mechanism that illustrate my point. (shrink)

J. S. Mill and the Art of Compromise The word compromise means a kind of agreement and a concession to something harmful or wrong. I argue that particularly this second sense is quite relevant in the ethics of political action. John Stuart Mill focused upon this issue in his Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform 1859. I outline Mill's doctrine on compromise looking at the external and internal features of an acceptable measure of compromise. These features provide a set of conditions necessary (...) in order for compromise to take place, but they do not guarantee sufficient conditions. In order to assess Mill's political coherence and to draw a general distinction between strategic and ethical compromises the paper concludes by considering two compromise measures that Mill adopted while he was a Member of Parliament. (shrink)

What constraints should be imposed on individual liberty for the sake of protecting our collective security? A helpful approach to answering this question is offered by a theory that grounds political obligation and authority in a moral requirement of fair contribution to mutually beneficial cooperative schemes. This approach encourages us to split the opening question into two—a question of correctness and a question of legitimacy—and generates a detailed set of answers to both subsidiary questions, with a nuanced and plausible set (...) of implications. The plausibility of its treatment of the issues surrounding liberty and security, I argue, helps to confer credibility on the fairness-based theory that carries these implications. (shrink)

El artículo defiende que los compromisos son tanto un tipo de acuerdo como un tipo de decisión. Los principales objetivos son: 1) identificar la estructura formal de las situaciones de compromiso en las que alguna decisión de compromiso es inevitable, incluyendo CDs que ponen en riesgo la integridad del decisor; 2) mediante las nociones de juicio básico y compulsivo propuestas por Amartya Sen, establecer cuándo una CD en una situación de compromiso podría estar moralmente justificada. Se concluye que las CDs (...) justificadas implican una contrición moral que ayuda a salvar la distancia entre deontología y consecuencialismo. (shrink)