How should the state justify its coercive rules? Public reason liberalism endorses a public justification requirement: Justifications offered for authoritative regulations must be acceptable to all members of the relevant public. However, as a criterion of legitimacy, the public justification requirement is epistemically unreliable: It prioritizes neither the exclusion of false beliefs nor the inclusion of true beliefs in justifications of political rules. This article presents an epistemic alternative to the public justification requirement. Employing epistemological theories of argumentation, we demonstrate (...) how this approach enables assessing the epistemic quality of justifications of political rules, even when the truth is difficult to establish. (shrink)

The “welcome return” to “substantive political philosophy” that Rawls'sA Theory of Justicewas said to herald has resulted in forty years of proposals seeking to show that philosophical reflection leads to the demonstrable truth of almost every and any conceivable view of the justice of property rights. Select any view—from the justice of unregulated capitalist markets to the most extreme forms of egalitarianism—and one will find that some philosophers have proclaimed that rational reflection uniquely leads to its justice. This is, I (...) believe, a sort of ideological thinking masquerading as philosophizing. In this paper, using some tools from game theory as well as experimental findings, I seek to sketch a non-ideological approach to the question of the justification of property rights. On this approach the aim of political philosophy is, first and foremost, to reflect on whether our social rules of property are within the “optimal eligible set” of rules acceptable to all. (shrink)

En su obra The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen expone una crítica a lo que denomina «teoría transcendental de la justicia», argumentando que su papel resulta irrelevante para guiar las acciones requeridas para combatir la injusticia en condiciones no-ideales. En este trabajo exploramos una posible relación de compatibilidad entre el enfoque comparativo auspiciado por Sen y un marco mínimo transcendental de justicia global que constriña las elecciones para evitar trayectorias institucionales que desemboquen en escenarios incompatibles con las concepciones de justicia (...) que generaron las evaluaciones originales. (shrink)