Communitarians reject the impartial and universal viewpoint of liberal morality in favor of the "situated" viewpoint of the agent's community, and elevate political community into the moral community. I show that the preeminence of political community in communitarian morality is incompatible with concern for people's lives in the partial communities of family, friends, or others. Ironically, it is also incompatible with the communitarian thesis about the situated nature of moral agency. Political community is preeminent in communitarianism because of its unargued-for (...) assumption that a good society is a morally unified society. I further argue that the ability to take the impartial standpoint is essential to the ability to make particular commitments that have an intrinsic human importance. (shrink)

There is an awakening of interest in links between geography and moral philosophy, or ethics. This paper reviews a range of issues where common ground might be found on this new disciplinary interface. These issues include the historical geography of moralities, the notion of moral geographies, inclusion and exclusion in the context of the bounding of spaces, and the moral significance of distance and proximity, as well as the more familiar concern with social justice. Environmental ethics provides a link with (...) the physical side of the subject. Some suggestions are made as to the possible contribution of geography to the understanding of moral issues. (shrink)

An education for cultural coherence tends to the child’s well-being through identity construction and maintenance. Critics charge that this sort of education will not bode well for the future autonomy of children. I will argue that culturally coherent education, provided there is no coercion, can lend itself to eventual autonomy and may assist minority children in countering the negative stereotypes and discrimination they face in the larger society. Further, I will argue that few individuals actually possess an entirely coherent identity; (...) rather, most of us possess hybrid identities that lend themselves to multiple, not necessarily conflicting allegiances. (shrink)

Examines democracy in the Philippines using the political thought of Jürgen Habermas. Winner of the 2016 Outstanding Scholarly Work Award for the School of Humanities presented by Ateneo de Manila University This book is a pioneering study of Philippine democracy, one of the oldest in the Asian region, vis-à-vis Habermasian critical theory. Proceeding from a concise examination of the theory of law and democracy found in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, Ranilo Balaguer Hermida explains how the law occupies the central (...) role in both the legitimation of political power and the attainment of social integration. He then discusses how Habermas proposes to resolve the tension that exists in modern society between democratic norms and social facts, through the adoption of a lawmaking procedure whereby the informal sources of issues and opinions from the public sphere are allowed to develop and interact with the formal deliberations and decision processes inside the political system. He also explores certain provisions of the present Philippine Constitution that were expressly intended to restore democratic institutions and processes destroyed by decades of martial law, as well as the problems and hindrances that stand in the way of their full implementation. Ranilo Balaguer Hermida is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. He received his PhD in philosophy from Monash University in Australia. (shrink)

Sociologists of education often emphasize goods that result from a practice (external goods) rather than goods intrinsic to a practice (internal goods). The authors draw from John Dewey and Alasdair MacIntyre to describe how the same practice can be understood as producing “skills” that center external goods or as producing habits (Dewey) or virtues (MacIntyre), both of which center internal goods. The authors situate these concepts within sociology of education’s stratification paradigm and a renewed interest in the concept of alienation, (...) contrasting the concepts of skills, habits, and virtues to capital, credentials, and habitus. They close by connecting the argument to broader critiques of procedural liberalism and the ideology of meritocracy, then giving suggestions for an expanded sociology of education beyond the stratification paradigm. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 190-227, May 2022. There is a sense of fairness that is distinctive of markets. This is fairness among economic competitors, competitive fairness. We regularly make judgments of competitive fairness about market participants, public policies and institutions. However, it is not clear to what these judgments refer, or what moral significance they have. This paper offers a rational reconstruction of competitive fairness in terms of non-domination. It first identifies competitive fairness as a (...) distinctive claim, advanced within markets in turn characterized as antagonistic, instrumental and procedural. It distinguishes competitive fairness from a number of familiar ideals with which it might be confused: legitimate expectation, equality of opportunity, sporting fairness and economic efficiency. While many exponents likely assume competitive fairness can be explained in terms of one of these ideals, in each case there are significant objections to doing so. Instead, the paper argues that the most promising justification of competitive fairness is under the republican ideal of non-domination, which can reconstruct many of the intuitive judgments of competitive fairness that we make in particular cases. However, it concludes, this explanation makes it difficult for exponents to continue to emphasize competitive fairness, given diverse other risks of domination, and to other values, in markets. (shrink)

In *Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case*, BAI Tongdong says that his main target is democracy, but he focuses much of his critiques on liberalism, rejecting its foundational value of autonomy in favor of Confucian grounds for governance. Given the extent of his concurrence with liberalism, however, it would be more consistent with Bai’s stated aim (of tempering the democratic part and shoring up the liberal side of liberal democracy) to make common cause with liberalism against populism. Mencian compassion and (...) humaneness have much to add to liberal conversation about virtue, and a Mencian-liberal theory of governance, instead, could yield the Confucian ideal of ‘harmony without uniformity,’. (shrink)

I argue that there are liberal reasons to reject what I call “Global Individualism”, which is the conjunction of two views strongly associated with liberalism: moral individualism and social individualism. According to the first view, all moral properties are reducible to individual moral properties. The second holds that the social world is composed only of individual agents. My argument has the following structure: after suggesting that Global Individualism does not misrepresent liberalism, I draw on some recent insights in social ontology (...) to show that it is inconsistent with the satisfaction of an important liberal principle related to the protection of individual rights over time. As I hold, to solve this problem we need to accept group agents acting as moral agents, which in turn commits us to the weaker notion of normative individualism (a view that is consistent with the existence of some group moral properties). I conclude with the suggestion that even this solution is costly for liberalism, for the conjunction of group moral agency and normative individualism makes the latter unstable and compels liberals to a much less individualistic stance than expected. (shrink)

Den moralske virkelighed er en filosofisk undersøgelse af moral og etik i videst mulige forstand, der bunder i en frustration over oplevelser med den filosofiske etik. Den filosofiske etik skal vejlede os moralsk i vore handlinger, men det synes som om den hverken kan hjælpe os med det eller redegøre for moralen. Moral er et samfundsmæssigt fænomen, men det gør den filosofiske etik typisk ikke meget ud af. I en situation, hvor etikken er i krise, er det derfor værd at (...) se på, hvad moralsociologien kan berige etikken med. Pointen er ikke, at sociologien skal afløse eller begrunde etikken. Idéen er, at udvikle en filosfisk etik, der er sociologisk informeret. I det perspektiv analyseres Émile Durkheim, Niklas Luhmann og Zygmundt Bauman, ligesom det afslutningsvist skitseres, hvordan en sociologisk informeret etisk refleksion kunne se ud. (shrink)

Anti-commodification theorists condemn liberal political philosophers for not being able to justify restricting a market transaction on the basis of what is sold, but only on the basis of how it is sold. The anti-commodification theorist is correct that if this were all the liberal had to say in the face of noxious markets, it would be inadequate: even if everyone has equal bargaining power and no one is misled, there are some goods that should not go to the highest (...) bidder. In this paper, I respond to the anti-commodification critique of liberalism by arguing that the political liberal has the wherewithal to account not only for the conditions under which goods should not be sold, but also for what kinds of goods should not be for sale in a market economy. The political liberal can appeal to a principle of equal basic rights, and to one of sufficiency in basic needs and the social bases of self-respect, I argue, to account for what’s problematic about markets in civic goods, necessary goods, and physical goods including body parts and intimate services. (shrink)

In this paper I shall investigate the nature of education as seen from the neoAristotelian perspective. My thesis is that education should be seen as a part of political activity in the source sense of the term, that is, as an element of human development rooted in the idea of the good, which makes this concept at odds with the modern concepts of politics and education. I start with a brief discussion of the classical concept of politics with special attention (...) being paid to the relation between ethics, education and politics. I then address the changes in the philosophical background of this concept of politics introduced in early modernity, in order to indicate the consequences of this process for education as subordinated to an economy-influenced politics. Following is the discussion of some aspects of contemporary Aristotelianism. I argue for the thesis that education is the basic form of policy understood along Aristotelian lines. (shrink)

In contemporary development and political studies the Capability Approach as proposed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum has become an alternative analytical framework used to conceptualise the promotion of well-being (‘capabilities’) in society. Notably, an important component of this framework is agency, which underscores the various ‘transformation mechanisms’ towards realising well-being in societies. This study straddles the area of political theory and development studies and seeks to contribute to the literature on the Capability Approach from a fresh perspective of the (...) contest for agency between the different political stakeholders in society’s development arena. The study interrogates the agency roles of different stakeholders in society’s development focusing on the liberal-communitarian and the state-in-society debates on the politics of state from the perspective of the Capability Approach. (shrink)

World Crisis and Underdevelopment examines the impact of poverty and other global crises in generating forms of structural coercion that cause agential and societal underdevelopment. It draws from discourse ethics and recognition theory in criticizing injustices and pathologies associated with underdevelopment. Its scope is comprehensive, encompassing discussions about development science, philosophical anthropology, global migration, global capitalism and economic markets, human rights, international legal institutions, democratic politics and legitimation, world religions and secularization, and moral philosophy in its many varieties.

Liberal political philosophy presupposes a moral theory according to which the ability to assess and choose conceptions of the good from a universal and impartial moral standpoint is central to the individual's moral identity. This viewpoint is standardly understood by liberals as that of a rationalhuman(nottranscendental) agent. Such an agent is able to reflect on her ends and pursuits, including those she strongly identifies with, and to understand and take into account the basic interests of others. From the perspective of (...) liberalism as a political morality, the most important of these interests is the interest in maximum, equal liberty for each individual, and thus the most important moral principles are the principles of justice that protect individuals' rights to life and liberty.According to the communitarian critics of liberalism, however, the liberal picture of moral agency is unrealistically abstract. Communitarians object that moral agents in the real world neither choose their conceptions of the good nor occupy a universalistically impartial moral standpoint. Rather, their conceptions of the good are determined chiefly by the communities in which they find themselves, and these conceptions are largely “constitutive” of their particular moral identities. Moral agency is thus “situated” and “particularistic,” and an impartial reflection on the conception of the good that constitutes it is undesirable, if not impossible. Further, communitarians contend, the good is “prior” to the right in the sense that moral norms are derived from, and justified in terms of, the good. An adequate moral and political theory must reflect these facts about moral agency and moral norms. (shrink)

This paper begins by describing recent controversies over cross-contamination of crops in the United States and European Union. The EU and US are both applying the principle of freedom of cropping to resolve these conflicts, which is based on an individualistic philosophy. However, despite the EU and the US starting with the principle of freedom of cropping they have very dissimilar regulatory regimes for coexistence. These contradictory policies based upon the same principle are creating different sets of winners and losers. (...) In the US the organic industry claims the system of coexistence is unfair and in the EU the biotech industry claims the system is unfair. It seems that states, despites claims to neutrality and freedom of choice, are prejudicing one system of agriculture over another in resolutions to the conflict over cross contamination. In this paper I will argue that if states cannot remain neutral in coexistence policies, there are conditional reasons for favoring the organic industry over the biotech industry in coexistence policies based in communitarian moral philosophy. (shrink)

In this book I offer a critical, comparative and empirically-informed defense of Islamic schools in the West. To do so I elaborate an idealized philosophy of Islamic education, against which I evaluate the situation in three different Western countries. I examine in detail notions of cultural coherence, the scope of parental authority v. a child's interests, as well as the state's role in regulating religious schools. Further, using Catholic schools as an analogous case, I speculate on the likely future of (...) Western Islamic schools. (shrink)

I propose to criticize two strands of argument - contractarian and utilitarian – that liberals have put forth in defense of economic coercion, based on the notion of justifiable paternalism. To illustrate my argument, I appeal to the example of forced labor migration, driven by the exigencies of market forces. In particular, I argue that the forced migration of a special subset of unemployed workers lacking other means of subsistence cannot be redeemed paternalistically as freedom or welfare enhancing in the (...) long run. I further argue that contractarian and utilitarian approaches are normatively incapable of appreciating this fact because the kinds of reasons that they adduce for justifying the long-term freedom-enhancing consequences of forced migration are not ones that would be acceptable to the migrants themselves. I conclude that only a discourse ethical approach, which mandates direct, empathetic communication between would-be migrants and members of potential host communities, captures the full range of reasons that would be acceptable to both migrants and members of these communities. These reasons – appealing both to agency-enhancing communal attachments as well as to agency-enhancing freedom of choice – fully reveals the extent to which a global capitalist system composed of relatively closed national communities coerces the world’s poorest migrants. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between federalism and individual liberty. It is shown that a complete treatment of the relationship between federalism and individual liberty should consider two countervailing effects. On the one hand, a federalist structure enhances individual liberty by enlarging the choice set of the citizens. On the other hand, however, a federalist system leads to institutional diversity, a fact that per se leads to higher exit costs, which a citizen must bear if he or she decides to (...) change jurisdictions. This effect on individual liberty is a negative one, since a consequence of every increase in the exit costs is a decrease of individual liberty. The optimum range of diversity of jurisdictions is shown to lie where the two effects counterbalance each other. (shrink)

Among the theorists commonly associated with the communitarian critique of liberalism of the 1980s (Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre), MacIntyre is the one who offers the most radical set of challenges to ways of thinking that typify contemporary liberalism. But does MacIntyre's thought add up to a fully worked‐out political philosophy? The specifically political implications of MacIntyre's contributions to moral philosophy are surprisingly underdeveloped in MacIntyre's most influential writings, notwithstanding the rhetorical force of his polemics against (...) liberalism. Happily, MacIntyre has more recently published works in which his political vision is more clearly spelled out. (shrink)

Is capitalism inimical to community? Yes, say communitarians, a large part of whose body of writing is given over to the elaboration and defense of various forms of this thesis. The aim of the present essay is to contest this answer. Not only, I will argue, is there no good reason for supposing capitalism inimical to community, but there is reason to think it more conducive to community than are the feasible alternatives to it.

Populism’s Challenges to Political Reason can be seen as a consequence of social and cultural trends, the so called ‘emotional culture’, that have been accentuated in recent decades. By considering those trends, this article aims at shedding light on some distinctive marks of contemporary populism in order to argue for a reconfiguration of the public sphere that, without ignoring emotion, recovers argumentation and persuasion based on facts and reason.

En 1992 Charles Taylor escribiá un libra titulado Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Dos anos más tarde la misma editorial, Princeton University Press, publicá una reedicián. Se afiadía una leve variante en el título, la palavra examining: Multiculturalism. Examining the politics of recognition. La novedad de esta edicián fue que se afiadieran dos nuevos ensayos, uno de Jürgen Habermas, titulado Stmggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State y el otro por K. Anthony Appiah, afraamericano, con lo que se (...) afiade al libra una nota de color, en ese reclamo del recõnocimiento de la identidad. (shrink)

Reason, religion, and public culture have been of significant interest recently, with critics reevaluating modernity's conception of secularism and calling for a “postsecular” public discourse. Simultaneously, one sees rising religious fundamentalisms and a growing style of antirationalism in public debate. These conditions make a reconceptualization of public reason necessary. The main goals of this article are to establish agnostic public reason as the conceptual guide and normative ethic for public debate in liberal democracies by considering the secular/religious reason boundary explicitly (...) and to argue that this ethic of public reason requires a commitment to reason giving and a particular epistemic attitude but that it does not, nor should it, take precedence over first-order judgments. An ethics of citizenship based on the process of reason giving with the appropriate epistemic stance might be one step toward rectifying the problem of an increasing separation between enclave publics, even if, by design, it cannot solve fundamental disagreement. (shrink)

There is an awakening of interest in links between geography and moral philosophy, or ethics. This paper reviews a range of issues where common ground might be found on this new disciplinary interface. These issues include the historical geography of moralities, the notion of moral geographies, inclusion and exclusion in the context of the bounding of spaces, and the moral significance of distance and proximity, as well as the more familiar concern with social justice. Environmental ethics provides a link with (...) the physical side of the subject. Some suggestions are made as to the possible contribution of geography to the understanding of moral issues. (shrink)

This essay discusses how international political theory can become more receptive towards Islamism. The central claim is that Islamism can be interpreted as a form of communitarianism. To underpin this claim, the study relies on an analysis of how the concepts of community and person are conceived in communitarianism and Islamism. On the basis of the affinities of these conceptions between Islamism and communitarianism the essay shows that Islamism can be interpreted as a form of communitarianism. The study then concludes (...) that understanding Islamism as communitarianism produces a common space for public reasoning which would deserve more consideration from political theorists. Secondly Islamism as communitarianism reassesses the possibility of a political theory engagement with Islamist theory that can benefit the recognition of human rights norms in circumstances in which Islamism is particularly influential. (shrink)

This paper examines the political philosophy of Liberalism with particular focus on the principles of liberal neutrality and value pluralism. These principles, which are advocated by the most prominent contemporary liberal theorists mark a significant departure from classical liberalism and its monistic approach to seeking truth and the good. I argue that the shift to neutrality and pluralism have done a disservice to liberalism and that the cultivation of discrimination skills is needed to deal with the complex tasks of making (...) decisions intelligently and effectively. (shrink)

We pose the question: Is consumer sovereignty in the healthcare market fact or fiction? Consumer sovereignty in healthcare implies that society benefits at large when healthcare organizations compete to develop high quality healthcare products while reducing the cost of doing business (reflected in low prices), and when consumers choose wisely among healthcare products by purchasing those high quality products at low prices. We develop a theoretical model that encourages systematic empirical research to investigate whether consumer sovereignty in healthcare is fact (...) or fiction. In doing so, we develop a series of theoretical propositions that may demonstrate that consumer sovereignty is more fiction than fact. Specifically, healthcare consumers lack the ability, motivation, and opportunity to choose healthcare products that are high in quality and low in price. Similarly, healthcare firms lack the ability, motivation, and opportunity to compete in ways to develop and market higher quality products at lower prices. (shrink)

As a starting point this paper takes Dewey's nowadays oftenstressed modernity and examines his social philosophy againstthe background of the current debates on republicanism andcommunitarianism. Particularly, the anaysis of Dewey's The Public and its Problem (1927) concludesthat the attention being paid to Dewey is problematic asspecific religious assumptions – explicitly developedin A Common Faith (1934) – lie in the backgroundof his social philosophy, and are hardly being recognized.However, as it shall be shown, without considering thereligious basis, neither Dewey's social philosophy (...) norhis educational theory can be properly understood. (shrink)

This article explores Charles Taylor's Hegelian and Aristotelian ethic of reconciliation. It comments on the critical work provided by Joel Anderson, Jürgen Habermas, Chandras Kukathas, Morag Patrick, Philip Pettit and Mark Redhead. It is argued that these critical perspectives on Taylor's work have not fully developed the spirit of liberalism which runs like a red thread through his ethic of reconciliation. For Taylor, reconciliation embraces others who are different from us and aims to create a virtuous culture. Taylor's critics overlook (...) the liberal implications of his ethic and also do not recognize his commitment to the plural diversity in modern societies. Taylor's communitarianism (post-liberalism in his mind) aims to create trust, openness and democratic accountability. The article concludes that democratic practice must also engage with others who are different from us, fostering a fusion of horizons that creates reconciliation and understanding. Key Words: communitarianism • ecology • interpretation • liberalism • post-liberalism • public sphere • reconciliation. (shrink)

Anarchism and Political Modernity looks at the place of 'classical anarchism' in the postmodern political discourse, claiming that anarchism presents a vision of political postmodernity. The book seeks to foster a better understanding of why and how anarchism is growing in the present. To do so, it first looks at its origins and history, offering a different view from the two traditions that characterize modern political theory: socialism and liberalism. Such an examination leads to a better understanding of how anarchism (...) connects with newer political trends and why it is a powerful force in contemporary social and political movements. This new volume in the Contemporary Anarchist Studies series offers a novel philosophical engagement with anarchism and contests a number of positions established in postanarchist theory. Its new approach makes a valuable contribution to an established debate about anarchism and political theory. It offers a new perspective on the emerging area of anarchist studies that will be of interest to students and theorists in political theory and anarchist studies. (shrink)

Populism’s Challenges to Political Reason can be seen as a consequence of social and cultural trends, the so called ‘emotional culture’, that have been accentuated in recent decades. By considering those trends, this article aims at shedding light on some distinctive marks of contemporary populism in order to argue for a reconfiguration of the public sphere that, without ignoring emotion, recovers argumentation and persuasion based on facts and reason.

This article takes a close look at the discussion of singularity in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural with the aim to comment on subject-object dichotomy and create a new context for its relationship with resistance. The philosophy of singularity is critical of humanism and the individualist model of subjectivity it advocates. By placing a challenging scenario of antihumanism against the humanist sense of responsibility, the philosophy of singularity questions whether it is possible to do philosophy without saying (...) ‘I’. This antihumanist stance, which replaces the ‘I’/‘other’ differentiation with Nancy’s ‘the other of another,’ chooses to strengthen the link between ontology and resistance in the notion of coexistence; beyond traditional hypotheses on immanence and transcendence. To discuss the merits and limits of this coexistence, the article digs under the notion of individualistic subjectivity and proceeds to ground Nancy’s ‘ekstasis’ on the Freudian theory of drives. Against this theoretical background, the values of modesty and responsibility come to formulate an alternative moral consciousness, which no longer relies on the humanist jargon to work toward the common ground between 'I' and 'we'. (shrink)

An important issue within the field of global ethics is the extent or scope of moral obligation or duties. Cosmopolitanism argues that we have duties to all human beings by virtue of some common property. Communitarian ethics argue that one’s scope of obligation is circumscribed by one’s community or some other defining property. Public virtues, understood to be either a property that communities possess to function well or a moral excellence constitutive of that community, offer an interesting challenge to this (...) binary by positing moral goods or excellences that are constitutive of a community yet global in application. Virtues such as tolerance, charity, moderation, or benevolence might be examples of such goods or excellences endorsed by a community but applied to individuals who are not members of the community, or, as in the case of environmental ethics, even to entities that are not moral agents. Unlike cosmopolitan ethics, the scope of the obligation does not depend on identifying universal properties, such as rationality, human dignity, or utility, but could be defined entirely by and within a community. (shrink)

Roger Silverstone proposed media hospitality as an important element of media ethics. I agree that media hospitality can make a valuable contribution to media ethics. However, I have doubts about grounding media hospitality in what has been referred to as the “deductive abstractions and absolutist language of much media ethics theorizing” founded on Enlightenment assumptions. Despite his own reservations about Enlightenment theorizing, I propose that Silverstone's account ultimately suffers from these problems of abstraction and absolutism, as seen most clearly from (...) the vantage point of Alasdair MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian theory of virtue ethics. (shrink)

In this article I seek a more complete understanding of evil action. To this end, in the first half of the article I assess the conceptual strengths and weaknesses of the most compelling theories of evil action found in the contemporary philosophical literature. I conclude that the theories that fall under the category I call ‘‘Nuanced Harm Accounts’’ successfully identify the necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept. However, necessary and sufficient conditions are not coextensive with significant features, and Nuanced (...) Harm Accounts are incomplete even if they are correct. In order to supplement them, in the second half of the article I examine the normative relation that obtains between perpetrators and victims of evil and find them to be parties to a relation of asymmetrical power in which the vulnerability of the weaker party is exploited by the stronger party for its advantage, pleasure, or otherwise to achieve its aims. Moreover, the parties in the relation reciprocally enable each other’s role relative to one another. The strength of the more powerful party emerges out of the states of vulnerability of the victims, and the victims are vulnerable relative to the power(s) of the perpetrator. (shrink)

“Resilience” is booming. No longer a mere metaphor or abstract reference to dispositional properties, the resilience of communities or social-ecological systems is increasingly grounded in specific first-order properties. Consequently, resilience now constitutes a contentful and achievable partial conception of a good society. Yet political philosophers have taken little notice. The current article first discerns within recent social-scientific literature a set of attainable and measurable first-order properties that constitute “community resilience” or “ecological resilience.” Then, specifying “resilience” as the resilience of high-HDI (...) democratic societies to environmental disasters, infrastructure failures, and economic collapse, the current article argues from within a liberal framework that both “classical” and “egalitarian” liberals must treat resilience so understood as a necessary condition of legitimacy and justice; and this conclusion forces an overhaul of these liber... (shrink)

En este trabajo trato de demostrar que Nino no logra articular un liberalismo completamente antiperfeccionista en su respuesta al comunitarismo. Para ello, parto de reconstruir el diagnóstico que Nino ofrece de la crítica comunitarista al liberalismo y señalo que para darle respuesta se compromete con una concepción particular del bien basada en la idea de autorrealización autónoma. En la siguiente sección desarrollo la manera en la que esa concepción del bien da forma al liberalismo de Nino y, en el apartado (...) siguiente, la confronto con un experimento mental destinado a evaluar si es capaz de bloquear distintas políticas estatales de corte perfeccionista. En la última sección ofrezco unas breves conclusiones respecto al modo en el que la adopción de una concepción del bien particular limita las pretensiones antiperfeccionistas de su teoría liberal. In this paper I attempt to prove that Nino does not succeed in developing a fully antiperfectionist account of liberalism as an answer to the communitarian challenge. I begin with a reconstruction of Nino’s diagnosis of the communitarian challenge to liberalism and point out that, in order to answer it he commits himself to a particular conception of the good based on the idea of autonomous self-realization. In the next section I develop the way by which that conception of the good shapes Nino’s liberalism. I further challenge his liberalism with a mental experiment designed to asses if it is capable of blocking several perfectionist State policies. In the last section I offer some brief remarks on the way the adoption of a particular conception of the good limits the antiperfectionist scope of Nino’s liberalism. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza críticamente la caracterización del comunitarismo (Michael Walzer y Amitai Etzioni) respecto de los problemas de desintegración social de las sociedades post-industriales (diagnóstico social) y las categorías propuestas (tolerancia, solidaridad y resocialización moral) para solucionar dichos problemas y sus consecuencias (apatía ciudadana, desinterés por los asuntos públicos, falta de compromiso social, criminalidad, vandalismo, etc.) El análisis se centra en el carácter funcional que asume el modelo de integración social comunitarista y en los problemas que presentan los fundamentos de (...) ese modelo (solidaridad y tolerancia). (shrink)

This article starts from two observations. The first is that some of the most prominent debates in social and political philosophy over the last few decades have been deeply obscured by the confusion of ontological/methodological and normative questions. And the second is that the renewed interest in Hegel's social philosophy has not yet yielded anything like a widely shared view as to whether it should be banned as a totalitarian or reappraised as a liberal account. The aim of this article (...) is first to specify systematically the ontological/methodological and normative dimensions of social philosophy by giving precise definitions of core concepts and paramount positions. Secondly, it is argued that Hegel's social philosophy can be characterized as combining what is called vertical holism with liberal communitarianism. This, thirdly, sheds new light both on the nature of fundamental questions in social philosophy and on the systematic relevance of Hegel's social philosophy. (shrink)

This paper attempts to sketch a critical model of political community by drawing upon recent contributions to the theory of ‘recognition’, particularly in the work of Axel Honneth. The paper proceeds by, first, delineating key features shared by a range of positions associated with ‘communitarianism’, along with the limitations and problems incurred by these commitments. The second part of the paper attempts to mobilise Honneth’s theoretical work to develop a conception of community that shares a number of the basic premisesvis-á-vis (...) political life associated with communitarianism, but which nevertheless accommodates the reservations expressed by communitarianism’s liberal and radical critics. (shrink)