Rainer Forst’s constructivism argues that a right to justification provides a reasonably non-rejectable foundation of justice. With an exemplary focus on his attempt to ground human rights, I argue that this right cannot provide such a foundation. To accord to others such a right is to include them in the scope of discursive respect. But it is reasonably contested whether we should accord to others equal discursive respect. It follows that Forst’s constructivism cannot ground human rights, or justice, categorically. At (...) best, it can ground them hypothetically. This opens the door wide for ethical foundations of human rights. (shrink)

In the course of the last 30 years, feminist theories of gender have shifted from quasi-Marxist, labor-centered conceptions to putatively ‘post-Marxist’ culture-and identity-based conceptions. Reflecting a broader political move from redistribution to recognition, this shift has been double edged. On the one hand, it has broadened feminist politics to encompass legitimate issues of representation, identity and difference. Yet, in the context of an ascendant neoliberalism, feminist struggles for recognition may be serving less to enrich struggles for redistribution than to displace (...) the latter. Thus, instead of arriving at a broader, richer paradigm that could encompass both redistribution and recognition, feminists appear to have traded one truncated paradigm for another – a truncated economism for a truncated culturalism. This article aims to resist that trend. I propose an anaysis of gender that is broad enough to house the full range of feminist concerns, those central to the old socialist-feminism as well as those rooted in the cultural turn. I also propose a correspondingly broad conception of justice, capable of encompassing both distribution and recognition, and a non-identitarian account of recognition, capable of synergizing with redistribution. I conclude by examining some practical problems that arise when we try to envision institutional reforms that could redress gender maldistribution and gender misrecognition simultaneously. (shrink)

The very idea of republican human rights, seems paradoxical. My aim in this article is to explore this disjunctive conjunction. One of the distinctive features of republican discourse, both in its civic humanist and neo-Roman variants, is the secondary status that rights are supposed to play in politics. Although the language of rights is not incommensurable with republican political thought, it is supposed to know its place. What can republican categories of political understanding offer for grappling with the challenges of (...) global politics? Many philosophical expressions of human rights today are Kantian or neo-Kantian in inspiration, and as a result they are plagued by the familiar difficulties raised by Kantian approaches to politics in general. In particular, the growing prominence of human rights discourse has led to withering attacks on the appeal to human rights without any effective means of enforcement. Does republicanism offer any resources for rethinking human rights, and in particular, addressing the concern with the often moralistic and depoliticizing nature of human rights talk today? What conception of human rights best promotes freedom as non-domination? Are our practices of human rights effective instruments for minimizing domination? (shrink)

This paper presents a substantivist construal of discourse ethics, which claims that we should see our engagement in public deliberation as expressing and elaborating a substantive commitment to basic moral ideas of solidarity, equality, and freedom. This view is different from Habermas's standard formalist defence of discourse ethics, which attempts to derive the principle of discursive moral justification from primarily non-moral presuppositions of rational argumentation as such. After explicating the difference between the substantivist and the formalist construal, I defend the (...) former by showing that it is not only intuitively compelling, but also particularly well equipped for addressing four important objections recently levelled against discourse ethics and its political applications. I conclude by pointing out some consequences of the previous discussion for the future of Critical Theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In his 2018 presidential address to the Society of Business Ethics, Jeffery Smith claimed that political approaches to business ethics must be attentive to both the distinctive nature of commercial activity and, at the same time, the degree to which such commercial activity is structured by political decisions and choices. In what we take to be a friendly extension of the argument, we claim that Smith does not go far enough with this insight. Smith’s political approach to business ethics focuses (...) solely on the outcomes of political choices. But if we think of politics in terms of processes—as in, ongoing disagreement and contest—and not merely a series of legal, administrative, or institutional outcomes, a different view of business ethics emerges. In particular, we argue that such an emphasis points us toward seeing business actors as having a normative duty to preserve the integrity and functioning of democracy. (shrink)

The traditional conception construes human rights as moral rights all people have due to some basic feature or interests deemed intrinsically valuable. This comported well with the revival of the discourse of human rights in the wake of atrocities committed during WWII. It served as a useful referent for local struggles against foreign rule and domestic dictatorship in the 1980s. Since 1989, human rights discourse acquired a new function: the justification of sanctions, military invasions, and transformative occupation administrations by outsiders, (...) framed as enforcement of international law against violators. The traditional conception doesn't fit this new function, hence the efforts to counter-pose a "political" to the "traditional" approach. This essay analyzes two recent versions of the political conception, and argues for a third. The thesis is that sovereign equality and human rights are normative principles of our dualist international system and both are needed to construct a more just version of that system. (shrink)

Against the well-established critical rejection of rights a growing literature in the tradition of agonistic democracy asserts their emancipatory role in the struggles for social change. However, agonistic theorists, invested as they are in the idea of democratic innovation as a process of gradual ‘augmentation’ of existing rules, institutions and practices, fail to account for the ruptural capacity, and hence for the full radical potential, of rights. Using the performative approach, I develop a conception of rights claiming as a defiant (...) practice to express the ruptural dimension of certain forms of rights politics. I demonstrate how defiant rights claiming articulates immanent critique by declaring the incapacity of putative duty-bearer institutions and governments to uphold the claimed right due to structural constraints, thereby generating inevitable contradictions within the extant order and creating the necessity for an alternative one. Moreover, in order to fully capture the emancipatory potential and creative capacity of rights, this article argues for understanding certain forms of rights politics both as augmentation and rupture, taking the two to be different dimensions of the same radical democratic practice. I present the creative use of rights discourse by the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and the transnational network of agrarian movements, La Via Campesina, as precisely such a combination of the practice of augmentation and defiant claims, which has led to the transformation of the right to food and land into the right to food sovereignty, demonstration of the structural embeddedness of rights violations in the existing global regime of food production and distribution, and authorisation of an alternative vision of the future. (shrink)

This essay reviews contemporary theories of public justification. In particular, it argues that conceptions of public justification and public reason have moved significantly beyond Rawls.

This article outlines the chief challenges concerning the philosophical theories of emancipation and clarifies the solutions provided by a so-called negative theory of justice. Besides highlighting the classic questions that every philosophical theory of emancipation is expected to answer, the article aims to highlight the link between this theoretical framework and an immanent critique of conditions of domination. Moreover, it sheds light on the main differences between this theoretical perspective and Honneth’s theory of recognition, Fraser’s three-dimensional conception of justice, and (...) the critique of power relations recently advanced by Rainer Forst. The comparative analysis of these theoretical approaches will make it possible to highlight and appreciate the main merits of a so-called negative theory of justice that combines a multidimensional diagnosis of existing asymmetries of power with an immanent critique of their justifications. (shrink)

Por meio de uma análise reconstrutiva da filosofia político-jurídica de Jürgen Habermas e de Rainer Forst, bem como com auxílio de literatura secundária, são analisados os conceitos de direitos culturais e tolerância. O objetivo da presente pesquisa é visualizar como Habermas e Forst desenvolvem os referidos conceitos. Para este fim, o artigo é dividido em duas seções, a partir de uma justificativa introdutória da investigação dos objetivos traçados. A primeira seção trata da questão que envolve os direitos culturais, seu significado, (...) evolução e maneira de efetivar sua garantia. A segunda seção aborda o conceito de tolerância, que Habermas trabalha enquanto necessidade procedimental a partir de direitos subjetivos a iguais liberdades de ação, enquanto Forst o trabalha a partir de uma concepção como respeito ao outro, em que será essencial o princípio de justificação da justiça, amparado no uso público da razão. Ao final, as últimas considerações apontam para o fato de que Habermas mantém seu edifício teórico da década de 1990, trabalhando a possibilidade de tolerância e a garantia de direitos culturais a partir de procedimentos democráticos e de justiça política, nos quais normas e leis devem ser racionalmente aceitas em uma cultura política compartilhada. Já Forst busca um rumo prático-normativo, em que a razão prática requer pessoas razoáveis e autônomas moralmente, trabalhando a necessidade de justificação por via procedimental. (shrink)