Proponents of public reason views hold that the exercise of political power ought to be acceptable to all reasonable citizens. This article elucidates the common structure shared by all public reason views, first by identifying a set of questions that all such views must answer and, second, by showing that the answers to these questions stand in a particular relationship to each other. In particular, we show that what we call the ‘rationale question’ is fundamental. This fact, and the common (...) structure more generally, are often overlooked or distorted within the literature. As a result, we argue, several prominent argumentative moves made by both critics and defenders of public reason are unsuccessful. Our overall conclusion is that discussions of public reason views would be more fruitful if they made consistent use of the common structure we identify. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

This chapter describes a philosophical approach to theorizing justice, mapping out some main strands of the tradition leading up to contemporary political philosophy. We first briefly discuss what distinguishes a philosophical approach to justice from other possible approaches to justice, by explaining the normative focus of philosophical theories of justice – that is, a focus on questions not about how things actually are, but about how things ought to be. Next, we explain what sorts of methods philosophers use to justify (...) theories of justice. Following this, in the longest section, we highlight major questions about justice that have drawn the attention of philosophers, and indicate how competing conceptions of justice have arisen from differing answers to these questions. The goal here is not to answer but to elucidate some of the larger questions about justice, as well as to establish a framework for understanding and distinguishing different kinds of claims about justice and some of the relations between them. (shrink)

This chapter describes how philosophical theorizing about justice can be connected with empirical research in the social sciences. We begin by drawing on some received distinctions between ideal and non-ideal approaches to theorizing justice along several different dimensions, showing how non-ideal approaches are needed to address normative aspects of real-world problems and to provide practical guidance. We argue that there are advantages to a transitional approach to justice focusing on manifest injustices, including the fact that it enables us to set (...) aside some reasonable disagreements about justice. The ‘bottom-up’ approach we advocate, for which we borrow Wolff’s term ‘real-world political philosophy’, is an empirically-informed normative analysis that attends to specific, identifiable injustices, and thus is partial, though not isolationist. We illustrate our approach by considering how different models of the nature of disability suggest different kinds of remedy for injustices faced by persons living with disabilities. We reflect on the nature and significance of vulnerabilities, and we assess the role of public opinion in normative theorizing, suggesting a particular significance for the opinions and experiences of marginalized groups. We finally reflect on the relevance of European legal and institutional frameworks for theorizing justice in Europe. (shrink)

Institutions to address short-termism in public policymaking and to more suitably discharge our duties toward future generations have elicited much recent normative research, which this chapter surveys. It focuses on two prominent institutions: insulating devices, which seek to mitigate short-termist electoral pressures by transferring authority away to independent bodies, and constraining devices, which seek to bind elected officials to intergenerationally fair rules from which deviation is costly. The chapter first discusses sufficientarian, egalitarian, and prioritarian theories of our duties toward future (...) generations, and how an excessive focus on the short term in policymaking may hinder that such duties be fulfilled. It then surveys constraining and insulating devices, and inspects their effectiveness to address the epistemic, motivational, and institutional drivers of political short-termism as well as their intra- and intergenerational legitimacy. (shrink)

This chapter assesses John Gray’s modus vivendi-based justification for liberalism. I argue that his approach is preferable to the more orthodox deontological or teleological justificatory strategies, at least because of the way it can deal with the problem of diversity. But then I show how that is not good news for liberalism, for grounding liberal political authority in a modus vivendi undermines liberalism’s aspiration to occupy a privileged normative position vis-à-vis other kinds of regimes. So modus vivendi can save liberalism (...) from moralism, but at cost many liberals will not be prepared to pay. (shrink)

Does political decision-making require experts or can a democracy be trusted to make correct decisions? This question has a long-standing tradition in political philosophy, going back at least to Plato’s Republic. Critics of democracy tend to argue that democracy cannot be trusted in this way while advocates tend to argue that it can. Both camps agree that it is the epistemic quality of the outcomes of political decision-making processes that underpins the legitimacy of political institutions. In recent political philosophy, epistemic (...) democrats have embraced this instrumentalist way of thinking about democracy. In this chapter, I argue that the attempt to defend democracy on epistemic instrumentalist grounds is self-undermining. I also develop an alternative – procedural – epistemic defence of democracy. I show that there is a prima facie epistemic case for democracy when there is no procedure-independent epistemic authority on the issue to be decided. (shrink)

Nossa seleção de verbetes parte do interesse de cada pesquisador e os dispomos de maneira histórico-cronológica e, ao mesmo tempo, temática. O verbete de Melissa Lane, “Filosofia Política Antiga” vai da abrangência da política entre os gregos até a república e o império, às portas da cristianização. A “Filosofia Política Medieval”, de John Kilcullen e Jonathan Robinson, é o tópico que mais demanda espaço na nossa seleção em virtude das disputas intrínsecas ao período, da recepção de Aristóteles pelo medievo e (...) da tensão entre poder Papal e Civil. No verbete “Liberalismo”, de Gerald Gaus, Shane Courtland e David Schmidtz, vemos as fontes fundantes da Filosofia Política da modernidade. As ideias de liberdade negativa e positiva se coadunam com a Ética Liberal e sua influência sobre a abrangência do valor fundamental da liberdade individual diante das políticas públicas. O texto de Ian Carter, “Liberdade Positiva e Liberdade Negativa”, expõe o paradoxo da liberdade em suas concepções valorativas e neutra, muito úteis para compreender os problemas políticos que enfrentamos hoje. Por fim, Bas Van Der Vossen no texto “Libertarianismo” trata das noções tensas entre Estado e indivíduos. A concepção de “liberdade de si”, genuinamente negativa, ganha destaque justificatório. Jackie Scully, no verbete Bioética Feminista, exemplifica o valor da influência dessas correntes no âmago de todos os contemporâneos. Sua escrita homenageia postumamente Anne Donchin com um apanhado histórico da luta de inserção de políticas feministas na pesquisa acadêmica global. No verbete “Democracia”, os professores brasileiros Gustavo Dalaqua e Alberto Ribeiro Barros acrescentaram tópicos importantes ao tema geral, respectivamente: “Construtivismo Representativo vs. Representação Descritiva” e “Democracia Contestatória de Philip Pettit”. O texto de Thomas Christiano perpassa os principais argumentos de justificação política contra e a favor da democracia ocidental, com foco central nas concepções de liberdade e igualdade. Os verbetes dispostos nessa seleção de textos são tendenciosos na medida que expressam o interesse genuíno de cada pesquisador com os assuntos relevantes em suas pesquisas. Em virtude disso, a escolha “adota um lado” em detrimento de outros – mais especificamente: de outro que poderia ser mais “progressista”. Por si só, o livro já nasce reclamando um segundo volume, que será providenciado. Colocamos de lado qualquer exigência de “imparcialidade”, algo que não existe na Filosofia, muito menos na Filosofia Política. Sobressai, nesse aspecto, o caráter reflexivo que o assunto exige e a importância do assunto, sem o qual não teríamos a modernas concepções de representatividade, as teorias da justiça ou mesmo as ciências sociais. Um outro volume, portanto, se faz imperativo, por conta da abrangência da própria SEP e do respeito a seu projeto inicial, genuinamente um plano plural. (shrink)

Why should one person obey another? Why (to ask the question from the first-person perspective) ought I to submit to another and follow her judgment rather than my own? In modern political thought, which denies that some are born rulers and others are born to be ruled, the most prominent answer has been: “Because I have consented to her authority.” By making authority conditional on the subjects’ consent, political philosophers have sought to reconcile authority’s hierarchical structure with the equal moral (...) standing of governor and governed. Yet such consent accounts of authority have long been deemed problematic on a number of grounds, not the least of which is that few citizens have given their consent to the state under whose laws they live. So unless we are willing to deny the state’s authority over those who have not consented, or revert to the pre-modern assumption of a natural political hierarchy, we must find another way of reconciling authority with our standing as free and equal moral agents. In recent political and legal philosophy, the most influential solution to this problem has been Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority, according to which legitimate authority, while it does not require the consent of the governed, must exist for their sake, or serve them. The normal way to justify someone’s authority, on the service conception, is to show that, by treating her directives as binding, the subjects are likely better to conform to reasons that apply to them anyway. The service conception has, however, recently been criticized (by, among others, Thomas Christiano, Scott Hershovitz, and Jeremy Waldron) for being insufficiently attuned to the significance that procedural, and in particular democratic, features of political and legal institutions have for the justification of their authority. If these ‘democratic critics’ are right, then two commitments that many in the liberal-democratic tradition may find independently attractive turn out to be in tension: the liberal idea that authority is normally legitimate only insofar as it serves its subjects, and the democratic idea that legitimate authority can (and regularly does) rest on fair procedures. In this article I argue that the critics’ arguments rest on a misunderstanding of the service conception; yet their worries point the way to an under-appreciated and interesting view of democracy as an authoritative arbitration procedure. After introducing the service conception’s view of justified authority, I briefly distinguish a broad and a narrow interpretation of it, and suggest that we should embrace the latter to make sense of the idea that political authority serves its subjects (Section I). Next I turn to the objection raised by the democratic critics: the service conception, they say, cannot make room for the intrinsic fairness of democratic procedures because it is preoccupied with the quality of outcomes (Section II). But, I argue, the objection rests on an illicit identification of two different kinds of outcomes: the outcome of the decision-making procedure on the one hand, the outcome or result of treating that first outcome as authoritative on the other. Distinguishing between these is crucial for an adequate understanding of democracy’s authority. While the service conception is indeed organized around the latter, this does not commit it to an exclusive concern with the former; yet it is a singular commitment to the former that is problematic from a democratic point of view (Section III). To bring home this point, I sketch a model of authority as arbitration that is frequently overlooked in recent discussions of authority even though it is centrally concerned with procedural (and ultimately democratic) values and fits squarely into the service conception of authority (Section IV). (shrink)

Political liberalism’s central commitments to recognizing reasonable pluralism and institutionalizing a substantive conception of justice are inconsistent. If reasonable pluralism applies to conceptions of justice as it applies to conceptions of the good, then some reasonable people will reject even many liberal conceptions of justice as unreasonable. If so, then imposing these conceptions of justice on citizens violates the liberal principle of legitimacy and related public justification requirements. This problem of justice pluralism requires that political liberals abandon their commitment to (...) institutionalizing a substantive conception of justice. Instead, political justification should be limited to the public justification of a modest scheme of rights and a set of constitutional rules. Justice pluralism chastens the ambitions of political liberalism while pushing the political liberal research program in new and promising directions. (shrink)

Der neue politische Realismus erkennt in John Rawls einen Erzfeind. In jüngeren Debatten scheint oft evident zu sein, dass gerade Eine Theorie der Gerechtigkeit exemplarisch für einen Moralismus sei, der die politische Wirklichkeit verzerre. Doch die Sache ist kompliziert. In diesem Aufsatz blicke ich zurück auf sein Frühwerk im Lichte dieser Kritik. Dabei geht es mir um vier Einwände: dass Rawls’ Idealtheorie kein Ratgeber für das politische Handeln und ideologisch verblendet sei; Macht und ihre Legitimierbarkeit nicht überzeugend konzipiere; die Bedeutung (...) politischer Konflikte und Uneinigkeit über den Inhalt der Gerechtigkeit unterschätze; und verkenne, dass eine wahrlich politische Theorie auf die Geschichte eingehen müsse. Wie stichhaltig sind diese Vorwürfe und was fördern sie zutage? Der Aufsatz zeigt, dass selbst Rawls’ erstes Hauptwerk nicht so einfach eines Moralismus überführt werden kann, wie es auf den ersten Blick den Anschein hat. Damit meine ich nicht, dass die Einwände allesamt keinen Biss hätten. Doch werden die Rechtfertigungslasten der Rawls’schen Gerechtigkeitstheorie nicht immer gebührend berücksichtigt; und manche Konterpunkte sind gerade bei wichtigen philosophischen Weggabelungen nicht ausreichend mit argumentativer Substanz untermauert. Wer einen Anti-Moralismus verficht, wofür es gute Gründe gibt, sollte weiterhin das konstruktive Gespräch auch mit dem frühen Rawls suchen und auf die internen Spannungen sowie realistischen Konzessionen seines Egalitarismus achten. (shrink)

It is common to encounter the criticism that Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority is flawed because it appears to justify too much. This essay examines the extent to which the service conception accommodates this critique. Two variants of this critical strategy are considered. The first, exemplified by Kenneth Einar Himma, alleges that the service conception fails to conceptualize substantive limits on the legitimate exercise of authority. This variant fails; Raz has elucidated substantive limits on jurisdiction within the service conception (...) of authority, albeit reluctantly and equivocally. The second, exemplified by Scott Hershovitz, alleges that the service conception fails to conceptualize procedural limits on the legitimate exercise of authority. He objects that the normal justification thesis fails to deny legitimacy to rational and expert dictators. This argument is more potent, but its force is concealed when it is aimed at the normal justification thesis rather than the quite separate jurisdictional limits of Raz’s theory. Clarifying those jurisdictional aspects of the service conception shows why the first argument fails and exposes the real strength of the second. Both variants have important consequences for our understanding of the service conception. (shrink)

Constitutions enshrine the fundamental values of a people and they build a framework for a state’s public policy. With regard to generational change, their endurance gives rise to two interlinked concerns: the sovereignty concern and the forgone welfare concern. If constitutions are intergenerational contracts, how (in)flexible should they be? This article discusses perpetual constitutions, sunset constitutions, constitutional reform commissions and constitutional conventions, both historically and analytically. It arrives at the conclusion that very rigid constitutions are incompatible with the principle of (...) intergenerational justice. Recurring constitutional reform commissions in fixed time intervals would give each generation of citizens a say without leaning too much to the side of flexibility. (shrink)

The passage of time influences the content of the law and therefore also the validity of legal arguments. This is true even for charter-arguments, despite the widely held view that constitutional law is made to last. In this paper, I investigate the reason why the sanctity-of life argument against physician assisted suicide lost its validity between the Supreme Court decision in Rodriguez v. British Columbia in 1993 and Carter v. Canada in 2015. I suggest that a rhetorical approach to argument (...) evaluation is the best basis for a satisfying explanation. (shrink)

This paper is part of a broader argument that seeks to offer a justification for political authority. It aims to investigate the role of truth in political argument and to place the problem of reasonable disagreement. The argument focuses on the possibility of political deliberation, that figures as a stage of political decision-making. It has to do with a confrontation between incompatible substantive beliefs which, however, all seem to be reasonable. How can citizens holding incompatible beliefs engage in an enterprise (...) of justifying them to one another? That is the question. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the view that, surprisingly, the more citizens deliberate about politics, the less likely they are to participate in the realm of the political, and vice versa. In the first part of the paper, I approach the problem from the perspective of the paradox of voting, the claim that voting itself is instrumentally irrational because of the very low probability that a single vote will make any difference at the elections. In the second part of the (...) paper, I argue that rather than analyzing voting instrumentally, it is better to view it as part of the civic commitments that constitute what it means to be a citizen in a democratic society. The act of voting is not primarily an individual?s attempt to decisively influence any particular outcome, but an affirmation of the key practice that upholds the democratic society in which citizens play a part. This reveals a meta-paradox of voting. Namely, to not vote is to exhibit a type of behavior that implies acceptance of democracy simultaneously with rejecting its defining component. Because of that, I will claim, not voting is itself irrational. In light of that conclusion, in the third part of the paper, I explore the extant divide between deliberation and participation by referring back to the analysis of civic commitments. Whereas participation without deliberating reveals ideological bias, deliberation without participation expresses a lack of understanding of what it means to be a citizen. The way to connect them is to engage in a process of attaining reflective equilibrium between the two, starting from the practice of deliberation that would be fully informed by the awareness of our democratic commitments and disconnected from ideologically motivated participation. (shrink)

This paper studies how legal choices, and in particular legislative determinations, need to consider multiple rights and values, and can be assessed accordingly. First it is argued that legal norms (and in particular constitutional right-norms) often prescribe the pursuit of goals, which may be in conflict one with another. Then a model of teleological reasoning is brought to bear on choices affecting different goals, among which those prescribed by constitutional norms. An analytical framework is provided for evaluating such choices with (...) regard to possible alternatives. The assessment of legislative choices according to proportionality is then considered, and is modelled using the provided analytical framework. Finally, the framework is expanded to include the ideas of reasonableness and institutional deference, and the corresponding margins of appreciation. (shrink)

In this article, I defend the idea that there are important differences between lying in politics and lying in general. My aim is to show that the issues with political lies do not have to do only with metaphysical or conceptual questions regarding what politics is or what the concept of the political means, or only with the validity of the excuses and justifications commonly offered in favor of political liars. I hold that the political lie is a special form (...) of lie due, first, to the peculiarity of the use of language in politics, and second, to the function that political lies play in political discussions: they undermine several epistemic conditions needed to impartially discuss social disagreements. In this work, however, I leave unanswered the question of what might be the best way to account for the epistemic conditions of democratic political discussion. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the ways in which “Public Reason” (or public reasons, in plural) can be said to resonate with some types of reasons as presented and defended in contemporary legal theory. I begin by identifying the concept of Public Reason within the context of a discussion sparked by the between “internal” and “external” reasons, which was made famous by Bernard Williams. I will then compare this interpretation of Public Reason with Joseph Raz’s celebrated concept of exclusionary reasons. (...) Next, I refer to two concepts of moral “neutrality” and how such concepts affect our understanding of Public Reason. I also reflect upon whether it is tenable to draw a distinction between the good reasons for actions that we conduct in our own lives and good reasons to be adopted in public life. Finally, I raise the question of a distinction between the reasons which we press in general societal discourse and those that we press in the advocacy-related law-making process. (shrink)

Anticipation is one of the main goals of new governance models, such as Responsible Research and Innovation. However, there is not a single mode of anticipation in this model. Two approaches can be addressed within the RRI framework: a socio-empirical one, which tends to underline the role of the democratic processes, aimed at identifying values on which governance needs to be anchored ; and a normative one, which stresses the role of EU goals as ‘normative anchor points’ in governance. These (...) two approaches also address two different models of anticipation: one based on the construction of shared pathways for reflexivity on the purposes of innovation, the other based on the progressive implementation of constitutional goals in risk assessment and management tools. However, both can be deemed partially unsatisfactory from the standpoint of human rights since one puts individual rights in the middle of the ‘values lottery’ where any participatory process ultimately leads; the other can be inadequate since fundamental rights are balanced alongside other goals and thus can be sacrificed, exposing the system to possible adverse court decisions. The normative framework of human rights can help to counterbalance both models aimed at maximising inclusion and those aimed at pursuing constitutional normative principles at the basis of technologically advanced societies, strengthening their dimension of anticipation according to a rights-based perspective. (shrink)

Among the various experiments in ‘new governance’, the model of Responsible Research and Innovation is emerging in the European landscape as quite promising. Up to now, there have been two versions of RRI: a socio-empirical version which tends to underline the role of democratic processes aimed at identifying values on which governance needs to be anchored and a normative version which stresses the role of EU goals as ‘normative anchor points’ of both governance strategies and policy making. Both versions are (...) unsatisfactory. The first since it suggests movable anchorage which could clash with prefixed values, such as individual rights. The second since it does not safeguard fundamental rights in the process of balancing ‘anchor points’. This result is counterintuitive because it exposes governance to the risk of facing adverse court decisions in the defense of individual rights, thus losing its anticipative attitude. In order to avoid this outcome, the paper argues that it is only through better integration between the system of human rights and that of EU fundamental rights that the anticipative feature of RRI can be preserved. (shrink)

I here address the question of how judges should decide questions before a court in morally imperfect legal systems. I characterize how moral considerations ought inform judicial reasoning given that the law may demand what it has no right to. Much of the large body of work on legal interpretation, with its focus on legal semantics and epistemology, does not adequately countenance the limited legitimacy of actual legal institutions to serve as a foundation for an ethics of adjudication. I offer (...) an adjudicative theory in the realm of non-ideal theory: I adopt a view of law that has achieved consensus in legal philosophy, make some plausible assumptions about human politics, and then consider directly the question of how judges should reason. Ultimately, I argue that judges should be cognizant of the goods that are at stake on particular occasions of adjudication and that this requires treating legal requirements transparently, i.e., as sensitive to their moral justifications. (shrink)

This paper considers the character of moral peoplehood, our life as a people, and the rules and principles through which that life is expressed. In so far as those rules and principles take legal form, as determining the ground rules of association and denoting political rights and duties, this moral community is also a jural community. The paper engages with Bernard Williams’s thought with a view to resolving the tension between two conceptions of the constitution that differ in their account (...) of the relationship between norms and time. Williams offers the prospect of a non-Kantian liberalism that grows out of the habits and minds of persons but which does not collapse into relativism. I argue that Williams’s account of moral personhood devotes insufficient attention to the dynamics of moral deliberation, essential to the growth of personhood. I argue that Williams’s account of moral peoplehood is similarly deficient in that it overlooks the role constitutional deliberation plays in constructing the jural community. Plural politics requires accepted ground rules and the sense that we are a unity of plural associates, and this is what constitutional deliberation aims to provide. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of the relation between political populism and mass media, and how this relation becomes problematic for democratic societies. It focuses on the fact that mass media, due to their purpose and infrastructure, can unintentionally reinforce populist messages. Research findings from communication science and political psychology are used to illustrate how, for example, a combination of mass media agenda setting and motivated reasoning can influence citizens’ political decisions and impair their political autonomy. This poses a particular (...) normative challenge for modern democracies: how to counter these populism-supporting effects within the constraints of democratic legitimacy? After showing how severely limited legal measures to curb populist media effects would be, the paper argues in favour of media competence education as a way of providing future citizens with an epistemic toolkit to navigate the media environment and strengthen their political autonomy. (shrink)

This article examines whether the voting age should be lowered to 16. The dominant view in the literature is that 16-year-olds in the United Kingdom are not politically mature enough to vote since they lack political knowledge, political interest and stable political preferences. I reject this conclusion and instead argue that the voting age should be lowered to 16. First, I look at Chan and Clayton’s empirical claims and show that these features of 16- and 17-year-olds are in fact created (...) by exclusionary social practices and therefore that these features cannot be used to justify their exclusion from the vote. Second, I evaluate preliminary evidence from Austria which suggests that 16- and 17-year-olds, when actually given the vote, are politically mature. Third, I show that, on a balance of harms, considering that some 16- and 17-year-olds are mature, we still should lower the voting age even if some 16- and 17-year-olds are not politically mature. I conclude that the voting age should be lowered to 16. (shrink)

This article critically analyzes Rawls’s attitude toward envy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls is predominantly concerned with the threat that class envy poses to political stability. Yet he also briefly discusses the kind of envy that individuals experience toward their social peers, which he calls particular envy, and which I refer to as peer envy. He quickly concludes, however, that particular envy would not present a serious risk to the stability of his just society. In this article, I contest (...) this claim by arguing that the principles that structure Rawls’s ideal society are likely to exacerbate particular envy to a politically risky extent. Section 1 reconstructs his account of envy, giving special attention to his belief that competition kindles envy between peers. Section 2 then examines the way in which Rawls often endorses rivalry within the body politic. I argue that the society governed by justice as fairness is, on account of this rivalry, likely to generate a politically problematic degree of particular envy. In Section 3, I invoke ancient Greece as an example of a society that was, as a result of its intense competitiveness, often imperiled by dangerously elevated levels of peer envy. I then survey the key institutional mechanisms by which the ancient Greeks sought to manage this hazardous emotion. It turns out, however, that most of these mechanisms would be unavailable to Rawls insofar as they starkly contravene his principles of justice. I conclude that if Rawlsians wish to establish a society that fosters rivalry, they would do well to reflect on the means by which peer envy can be effectively harnessed. (shrink)

ResumenEl objetivo del presente trabajo es mostrar que en circunstancias de ilegitimidad política utilizar la herramienta de la renta básica como un medio para satisfacer deberes humanitarios o de justicia distributiva se encuentra injustificado. La hipótesis que defenderé es que, en tales circunstancias, la renta básica debe ser utilizada para garantizar la posibilidad efectiva de participación política. Adicionalmente, esta justificación de la renta básica nos permite enfrentar una de las objeciones más poderosa que ha recibido, su aparente violación del principio (...) de reciprocidad.Palabras ClaveComunidad Política, reciprocidad, deber de asistenciaAbstractThe objective of the present work is to show that in circumstances of political illegitimacy using the basic income device as a means to satisfy humanitarian or distributive justice duties is unjustified. The hypothesis I shall defend is that, in such circumstances, the basic income should be used to guarantee the effective possibility of political participation. Additionally, that justification of the basic income enables us to face one of the most powerful objections the basic income has received, its apparent violation of the reciprocity principle.KeywordsPolitical Community, reciprocity, duty of assistance. (shrink)

The idea of global justice faces a serious challenge. We live in one global society and many regional and local societies at the same time. The existing plurality of institutional as well as cultural levels of social connection leads to this general question: what is the right site for addressing different questions of justice? Some philosophers argue that the paramount place for thinking about justice is the global level, but other philosophers claim that questions of justice presuppose a certain institutional (...) structure. It is therefore only at the local level, preferentially in the form of sovereign states, where questions of justice arise. I want to argue that it is possible to understand some issues of justice as global in an irreducible way, while other issues are best addressed on a local level not only for pragmatic reasons, but also for reasons that have to do with the normative significance of local institutions, cultural connections and social identities. (shrink)

The idea of global justice faces a serious challenge. We live in one global society and many regional and local societies at the same time. The existing plurality of institutional as well as cultural levels of social connection leads to this general question: what is the right site for addressing different questions of justice? Some philosophers argue that the paramount place for thinking about justice is the global level, but other philosophers claim that questions of justice presuppose a certain institutional (...) structure. It is therefore only at the local level, preferentially in the form of sovereign states, where questions of justice arise. I want to argue that it is possible to understand some issues of justice as global in an irreducible way, while other issues are best addressed on a local level not only for pragmatic reasons, but also for reasons that have to do with the normative significance of local institutions, cultural connections and social identities. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a solution to the Capacity/Equality Puzzle. The puzzle holds that an account of the franchise may adequately capture at most two of the following: (1) a political equality-based account of the franchise, (2) a capacity-based account of disenfranchising children, and (3) universal adult enfranchisement. To resolve the puzzle, I provide a complex liberal egalitarian justification of a moral requirement to disenfranchise children. I show that disenfranchising children is permitted by both the proper political liberal and (...) the proper political egalitarian understandings of the relationship between cognitive capacity and the franchise. Further, I argue, disenfranchising children is required by a minimalistic, procedural principle of collective competence in political decision-making. At the same time, I show that political equality requires the enfranchisement of all adults, regardless of cognitive capacities, and that the collective competence principle does not ground adult disenfranchisement. This justifies the progressive legal trend that holds the capacity-based disenfranchisement of adults to be incompatible with liberal democratic principles. (shrink)

Courts play a key role in deciding on public health controversies, but the legitimacy of judicial intervention remains highly controversial. In this article I suggest that we need to carefully distinguish between different reasons for persistent disagreement in the domain of public health. Adjudicating between public health controversies rooted in factual disagreements allows us to investigate more closely the epistemic capacities of the judicial process. While the critics typically point out the lack of appropriate expertise of judges—in particular with respect (...) to health and public health—we should not move too fast in inferring from this a generalized competence problem. This article offers four reasons for vindicating the importance of judicial intervention in factual disagreements: the relative independence of judges from the political establishment, the judicial commitment to evidence, the specific nature of judicial reasoning and an additional voice for the people in the policy-making process. (shrink)

Disagreement in politics is ubiquitous. People disagree about what makes a life worthy or well-lived. They disagree about what they owe to each other in terms of justice. They also disagree about the proper manner of dealing with the consequences of disagreement. What is more, they disagree about the normative significance of moral and political disagreement. Disagreement has been, for at least three decades now, the focus of a series of major works in political philosophy. It has been called one (...) of the fundamental ‘circumstances of politics’ by Waldron. Rawls took disagreement to be at the heart of the problem of political legitimacy. Gerald Gaus takes it to be the most important task of liberal political theory to justify political institutions in the face of ‘evaluative diversity’. For Thomas Christiano, disagreement is part of the basis of the authority of democracy.Political institutions make decisions and rules that are binding f. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a tension between two central features of Dworkin’s partnership conception of democracy. The conception holds, on the one hand, that it is a necessary condition of the legitimacy of the decisions of a political majority that every member of the political community has a very robust right to publicly criticize those decisions. A plausible interpretation of this argument is that free political speech constitutes a normatively privileged vehicle for political minorities to become majorities, and (...) therefore in the absence of freedom of speech minorities could not be rightfully compelled to comply with majority decisions. On the other hand, the partnership conception holds that properly exercised constraints on majority rule do not incur any moral costs. The no-moral-costs thesis is argued for on the basis that nothing of significance is lost when individuals’ influence on political decisions is diminished. However, the legitimacy argument for free speech assumes the significance of individual political influence, which the no-moral-costs thesis denies. Hence the tension. (shrink)

Expectations play an important role in how people plan their lives and pursue their projects. People living in highly industrialized countries share a way of life that comes with high levels of emissions. Their expectations to be able to continue their projects imply their holding expectations to similarly high future levels of personal emissions. We argue that the frustration or undermining of these expectations would cause them significant harm. Further, the article investigates under what conditions people can be thought to (...) hold legitimate expectations, in particular about permissible levels of future emissions. We distinguish differing theories of understanding these conditions, namely authority-based and justice-based theories, that each allows us to systematically distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate expectations. Furthermore, with respect to individuals’ future permissible emissions we give several reasons for holding that such theories cannot identify a particular expectation to a specific level of personal emissions as the only legitimate one. Finally, we argue that the set of legitimate expectations that people hold with respect to a just and effective solution to climate change has normative significance in at least two ways: the differing but equally legitimate expectations ought to be taken into account when justifying what could count as such a solution and when determining the just way of arriving at and implementing such a solution. (shrink)

Is it morally important to vote? It is common to think so, but both consequentialist and deontological strategies for defending that intuition are weak. In response, some theorists have turned to a role-based strategy, arguing that it is morally important to be an excellent citizen, and that excellent citizens vote. But there is a lingering puzzle: an individual vote changes very little (virtually nothing in large-scale elections), so why would the excellent citizen be so concerned to cast a ballot? Why (...) bother with something that has so little effect on the common good? This paper answers by developing the idea of respect for a practice, and then arguing that respect for democracy will often require citizens to vote. (shrink)

(Winner of The Res Publica Essay Prize) This article defends a moderate version of state perfectionism by using Gerald Gaus’s argument for liberal neutrality as a starting point of discussion. Many liberal neutralists reject perfectionism on the grounds of respect for persons, but Gaus has explained more clearly than most neutralists how respect for persons justifies neutrality. Against neutralists, I first argue that the state may promote the good life by appealing to what can be called “the qualified judgments about (...) the good life,” which have not been considered by liberal perfectionists including Joseph Chan and Steven Wall. Then I clear up several possible misunderstandings of these judgments, and argue that: (a) moderate perfectionism does not rely on controversial rankings of values and is committed to promoting different valuable ways of life by pluralistic promotion; and (b) moderate perfectionism requires only an indirect form of coercion in using tax money to support certain moderate perfectionist measures, which is justifiable on the grounds of citizens’ welfare. Thus, I maintain that moderate perfectionism does not disrespect citizens, and is not necessarily unfair to any particular group of people. It is, in fact, plausible and morally important. The defence of moderate perfectionism has practical implications for the state’s policies regarding art development, drug abuse, public education, and so on. (shrink)

This article argues that the courts, not the Home Secretary, should be empowered to issue Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures. It explains that at the heart of the debate are three questions: whether measures like TPIMs should be viewed primarily from the perspective of security or liberty; how we should conceive the executive and the courts; and the empirical question of how these two arms of government answer these questions. The non-mechanistic nature of legal reasoning means that legal reasons may (...) be constructed to fit one’s normative viewpoint on each of the first two questions. Importantly, however, the case law on judicial scrutiny of control orders consistently demonstrates that the courts themselves regard TPIMs as being primarily a restriction on liberty, which require a fair hearing before an independent court. Whilst this does provide some protection of individual rights, the nature of law as an unfinished practice means that for stable protection of individual rights judicial independence must be promoted and nurtured in both the legal and political realms. The failure of the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011 to vest the power to issue TPIMs in the courts thus represents a missed opportunity to secure political endorsement of enhanced legal protection of individual liberty in cases involving national security. (shrink)

The ability of very wealthy individuals (or, as I will call them, the ‘super-rich’) to turn their economic power into political power has been—and remains—an important cause of political inequality. In response, this paper advocates an original solution. Rather than solving the problem through implementing a comprehensive conception of political equality, or through enforcing complex rules about financial disclosure etc., I argue that we should impose a choice on the super-rich. The super-rich must choose between (i) forfeiting the things that (...) make them super-rich, i.e., pay a 100 % tax on their wealth above a certain level, or, (ii) they must forfeit some of their political rights. These rights include entitlements to fund political parties; to stand for office; and to work or volunteer for political parties. The right to vote, though, is not limited. I defend my proposal against non-consequentialist and consequentialist objections. I also argue that it avoids two problems that many attempts to reduce political inequality face; these are the political egalitarian’s dilemma and the problem of political equality’s relative moral importance. (shrink)

A number of phenomena have lent a new complexity to the long-standing challenge of constructing a legitimate and stable political order. I contend that both legitimacy and integration under contemporary conditions ultimately hinge upon a form of public practical reasoning that departs considerably from the ones proposed by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and several deliberative democrats. I argue that the generalizability test that constitutes the cornerstone of most contemporary neo-Kantian theories of public reason should be abandoned as a rule of (...) public argumentation and be replaced by a norm of civic responsiveness towards minority claims. I not only suggest that a wider variety of reasons, motives and genres of speech needs to be admitted within the purview of public reason, but more fundamentally that generalizability cannot cogently be seen as anything more (or less) than a civic virtue. The underlying point of this article is that neo-Kantian theories of public reason work with a problematic conception of practical reason. I conclude by providing reasons, against some radical and agonistic democrats, why the language of public reasoning needs to be retained and renovated. Key Words: acknowledgement • agonistic democracy • deliberative democracy • generalizability • Habermas • pluralism • practical reason • public reason • Rawls • social integration. (shrink)

Governments are increasingly making use of field experiments to evaluate policy interventions in the spheres of education, public health and welfare. However, the research ethics literature is largely focused on the clinical context, leaving investigators, institutional review boards and government agencies with few resources to draw on to address the ethical questions they face regarding such experiments. In this article, we aim to help address this problem, investigating the conditions under which informed consent is required for ethical policy research conducted (...) or authorized by government. We argue that investigators need not secure participants' informed consent when conducting government policy experiments if: the government institution conducting or authorizing the experiment possesses a right to rule over the spheres of policy targeted by the research; and data collection does not involve the violation of participants' autonomy rights. (shrink)

This article looks at Bernard Williams’s relevance to particular debates in constitutional theory about the legitimacy of two competing models of institutional design: political constitutionalism which endorses giving the final say on the meaning of constitutional rights to legislatures; and legal constitutionalism which endorses giving the final say on the meaning of rights to courts. Recent defences of political constitutionalism have made claims about the realism of their accounts when compared with legal constitutionalism and have co-opted Bernard Williams’s realism to (...) support their case. This article examines these claims, concluding that these accounts of political constitutionalism rely on a distinctly non-Williamsian form of political moralism in that they assume a legitimacy for political constitutionalism which is prior to politics and political disagreement. It offers an alternative defence of political constitutionalism, a partial defence, which, it argues, is closer to the realism of Bernard Williams than these accounts. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in civic republicanism. In light of this revival, it is interesting to consider what sort of theory of legal or judicial adjudication such a doctrine—centered on the value of promoting freedom from domination—would recommend. After discussing the importance of such a theory and clarifying its relationship to broader questions of institutional design, it is argued that theories of adjudication should be assessed according to three criteria: first, their contribution to the (...) republican cause of promoting freedom from domination; second, their suitability to the characteristic features of legal systems; and third, their impact on long-run institutional stability. According to these criteria, a republican theory of adjudication would hold that judges and other legal officials should strive in their decisions and interpretations to maintain and enhance the distinctive value of the rule of law. (shrink)

This article compares the ‘enfranchisement lottery’, a novel method for allocating the right to vote, with universal suffrage. The comparison is conducted exclusively on the basis of the expected consequences of the two systems. Each scheme seems to have a relative advantage. On the one hand, the enfranchisement lottery would create a better informed electorate and thus improve the quality of electoral outcomes. On the other hand, universal suffrage is more likely to ensure that elections are seen to be fair, (...) which is important for political stability. This article concludes that, on balance, universal suffrage is prima facie superior to the enfranchisement lottery. Yet the analysis shows that the instrumental case for the ‘one person, one vote’ principle is less conclusive than democratic theorists usually suppose. (shrink)

Democratic legitimacy is often grounded in proceduralist terms, referring to the ideal of political equality that should be mirrored by fair procedures of decision-making. The paper argues (§1) that the normative commitments embedded in a non-minimalist account of procedural legitimacy are well expressed by the ideal of co-authorship. Against this background, the main goal of the paper is to argue that structural forms of epistemic injustice are detrimental to the overall legitimacy of democratic systems. In §2 I analyse Young’s notion (...) of political powerlessness and claim that in structurally unjust social contexts members of powerless groups often are not properly acknowledged as functioning members of the polity, hence being jeopardized in their ability to develop part of their personal identity. In §III, I define gerrymandering as an example of political disempowerment that involves an epistemic harm for oppressed citizens, namely, to be prejudicially excluded from the community of epistemic trust. My thesis is that being epistemically disempowered has a negative impact on the way in which citizens understand themselves as political actors, since they suffer a lack of social recognition that may impede a proper development of their reflexive agency. In §IV, I discuss the proposal of granting epistemic privilege to members of oppressed groups, given their specific experience of social injustices. I introduce two concerns about this proposal, one morally grounded and one pragmatically oriented. Finally, in §V, I briefly sketch some institutional remedies that can be employed in order to politically fight systemic forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)