We are still unable to correctly identify the true crisis in Europe: whether it is a question of a lack of a demos or cratos; whether it is the democracy, legitimacy, or justice that is inadequate; whether we are facing a problem of intelligibility or of too little politicization. The article begin the analysis with three hypotheses: (1) none of the attempts to explain the crisis that focus on a single deficit or weakness seems satisfactory, so the discussion should focus (...) on the way these types of deficiencies are expressed and the extent to which each one of them is involved. For this very reason, it makes no sense to entrust the entire solution to the strengthening of one single criterion (participation, effectiveness, or communication, for example). (2) Polarizing the legitimacy framework around two possibilities (input and output) seems to be a simplification that does not do justice to the intricate way in which the results and the procedures, effectiveness and consent are related in a democracy. (3) The resulting description cannot be less complex than that which it is attempting to describe, so the task of repairing EU legitimacy should be carried out through a sophisticated division of labor (between institutions, criteria, and values). The process of European integration may be one of the most interesting manifestations of a general problem in today’s societies: how to reconstruct political authority to confront the new challenges of communal life. (shrink)

Human beings orient themselves in the world via judgments; factual, moral, prudential, aesthetic, and all kinds of mixed judgments. Particularly for normative orientation in complex and contested contexts of action, it can be challenging to form judgments. This paper explores what one can reasonably expect from a theory of the power of judgment from a Kantian approach to ethics. We reconstruct practical judgments on basis of the self-reflexive capacities of human beings, and argue that for the subject to see himself (...) as committed to prudential goods it is necessarily implied that he understands himself as committed to moral judgment. However, to understand the normativity of understanding oneself as a being with practical commitments at all, the aesthetic judgment is introduced: the power of judgment in its pure form of selfreflexivity. We claim that aesthetic reflection and judgment is conditional on the possibility for human beings to enter the space of reasons, and therewith for practical self-understanding as such. The paper concludes with a preliminary sketch of different conceptual possibilities in fleshing out the role of the power of judgment in its aesthetic employment in developing mixed judgments. (shrink)

This paper argues that, to tackle the issue of sustainability, we should pay more attention to the temporality of socioecological processes. Only thus can we better understand current subjective and institutional constraints, as well as envision new potential pathways for transformative change. Two main arguments are developed: (1) there is a uniqueness in the temporality of Earth system processes associated with planetary boundaries that deeply transforms our time horizon and the pace of change, and (2) this situation creates a disruption (...) of the temporality embodied in dominant sociopolitical conventions such as the institutional definition and operationalisation of sustainable development. New research avenues and time policies are suggested towards responding meaningfully to the alarming current socioenvironmental trends. (shrink)

Moral foundations theory (MFT) proposes the existence of innate psychological systems, which would have been subjected to selective forces over the course of evolution. One approach for evaluating MFT, therefore, is to consider the proposed psychological foundations in relation to the reconstructed Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. This study draws upon ethnographic data on nomadic forager societies to evaluate MFT. Moral foundations theory receives support only regarding the Caring/harm and Fairness/cheating foundations but not regarding the proposed Loyalty/betrayal and Authority/subversion foundations. These (...) latter two proposed foundations would seem to reflect the historical classic assumptions of modernity, involving self-interest, competition, individualism, hierarchy, authority and so forth. Studying the ethical dimensions of nomadic forager societies can highlight our biases about the foundations of morality, some of which may be steeped in particularist Western political and social traditions. Some recent developments from cosmopolitanism are discussed as an alternative evolving worldview that parallels nomadic forager ethos. (shrink)

In Luc Boltanski’s On Critique, various dimensions of democracy as a political regime and form of society are evident, but never explicitly conceptualized. There is, however, something to be gained by making the democratic dimension in Boltanski’s work more explicit: the normative and political standpoints become clearer, but also the real-life possibilities for and significance of critique in contemporary times. The paper will first discuss the (latent) democratic theory in On Critique by focusing on the differentiation between reality and the (...) world and the conceptualization of institutions. In a second step, I will relate a rather rudimentary democratic theory to the radical-democratic dimensions of the work of Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis in order to make its contours more explicit. In a third step, I will discuss a tension that exists between the radical-democratic dimension in On Critique and Boltanski’s portrayal of contemporary capitalist-democratic societies as largely immune to critique. (shrink)