Newey and Rawls in Dialogue: The Limits of Justification and the Conditions of Toleration

In this essay I analyse Glen Newey’s reading of John Rawls liberal theory of justice. Newey specifically focuses on strategic differences between A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, and he acutely highlights some tensions that are intrinsic to Rawls’s justificatory framework. I share many of Newey’s concerns, primarily regarding the necessity to take into account the motivational constraints when outlining a theory of liberal justice. Against Newey, however, in the second section of the paper I clarify some aspect of Rawls’s (hidden) epistemology, in order to make sense of the role that the virtue of toleration plays within his paradigm

Open Negotiation: The Case of Same-sex Marriage

This paper analyzes a very harsh case that is widely debated nowadays, namely the legal attempt to extend the right to marry to same-sex couples. This case is theoretically interesting, as it shows that even when there is a stable and shared agreement on a specific human right as it happens for the right to marry, still many public conflicts may arise with regard to the implementation of such right. The case of same-sex marriage involves a public conflict over the meaning of a specific concept, as “marriage”, that has been determined long time ago and that is now undergoing a process of re-conceptualization. A set of members of the society is against this process; some others believe that modifying this social standard, in order to make it more inclusive, is the only way for respecting the liberal ideal of equal respect for persons. I analyze the same-sex marriage case from two perspectives. (1) I expose different legal arguments that, following the “fundamental right” strategy, show that law should enforce rights, such as the right to same-sex marriage, whose enjoyment grants equal treatment before the law for every citizen. (2) I stress that it is also important to dwell on political arguments in favor of the extension to the right to marry to same-sex couples. These arguments acknowledge the fundamental role played by the symbolic aspects in the political deliberation over the same-sex marriage debate. In fact, same-sex couples’ request challenges the traditional view about family and their claim happens to be seen as running afoul of the morality of the majority. The main conclusion that I want to stress is that, in order to mitigate the public conflict around the same-sex case marriage, it is fundamental to booster a public deliberative procedure that involves a “concept negotiation” in which different alternatives are depicted and evaluated assessing their adherence to the normative evaluative standards that constitute the core values of liberal democratic societies. I will argue in favor of the practice of open negotiation, showing that both political institutions and the legal system can play a fundamental role in publicly recognizing the normative reasons that underpin the requests of extending the right to marry to same-sex couples. Provided that political institutions respect some normative constraints, it is possible to articulate an open negotiation between citizens and institutions in which even unreasonable citizens are included in the political processes; granting therefore a multilogical dialogue among citizens (horizontal relation) and among all citizens and institutions (vertical relation)

Does Epistemology Matter? Political Legitimacy in the Face of Disagreement

In this article my aim is to address the issue of the public justification of political liberalism from the perspective of moral epistemology. I begin showing that a strictly political account of liberal legitimacy is hostage of tensions that are intrinsic to the justificatory framework itself. On the one hand, an adequate conception of justice should grant the required normative force thanks to the appeal to compelling justificatory arguments. On the other hand, a strictly political version of liberalism is characterized by a major focus on the actual circumstances of justice and on the acknowledgment of the fact of pluralism. Rawls main goal in Political Liberalism, for example, is to provide a full justification for a strictly political conception of liberalism starting from the “here and now” of the contemporary political societies. Rawls believes that his version of political liberalism, being neutral with regard to metaphysical and epistemological disputes, can avoid dilemmatic outcomes. In the second part of the article, I argue, pace Rawls, that political liberalism cannot be robust vis-à-vis different theories of justification, because it is required that as theorists we take a stance regarding the epistemological framework we employ while developing a specific theory of political legitimacy. My proposal is that a moderate approach in moral epistemology expresses the best scheme available to us - as moral agents constrained by the limit of our rationality - for establishing a normatively binding, and yet realistic, procedure of justification for political institutions and practices. An epistemic moderate account can be described around four fundamental benchmarks: (1) a doxastic presupposition that highlights the fundamental deliberative role played by moral agents as they are the last authority for determining which principles are indeed compatible with their wide set of beliefs; (2) a fallibilist account of moral knowledge; (3) a coherentist theory of epistemic justification and (4) a moderate account of objectivity according to which the objectivity of the moral discourse rests on the correctness-apt deliberative procedure we produce as moral agents and that involves some correctness criteria that are publicly justified through the exchange of reasons among reasonable citizens

Epistemic Injustice in the Political Domain: Powerless Citizens and Institutional Reform

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 prejudicial 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

Reflective Agreement: a Nonideal Approach to Political Justification

A Nonideal Account of Moral Justification. The Dilemma of Liberalism and Public Consensus. Reflective Agreement in Nonideal Theory. The Justification of Human Rights and the Same-sex Marriage Case

Reflective Agreement: a Nonideal Approach to Political Justification

A Nonideal Account of Moral Justification. The Dilemma of Liberalism and Public Consensus. Reflective Agreement in Nonideal Theory. The Justification of Human Rights and the Same-sex Marriage Case.A Nonideal Account of Moral Justification. The Dilemma of Liberalism and Public Consensus. Reflective Agreement in Nonideal Theory. The Justification of Human Rights and the Same-sex Marriage Case.LUISS PhD Thesi

The Social Bases of Self-Respect. Political Equality and Epistemic Injustice

This paper investigates the limitations of the ideal of political equality under non-ideal circumstances and focuses specifically on the way in which structurally unjust social contexts endanger individuals’ perception of their own worth. Starting from Rawls’ definition of the social bases of self-respect as a primary good to be fairly distributed, the paper main goal is to provide normative arguments in favor of a power sensitive theory of political agency. A power sensitive theory, in fact, proves to be necessary as it sheds a light over the way in which power relationships affect the very possibility, for some members of the constituency, of fully enjoying the status of political reflexive agents. Against this background, in the paper I defend two main theses. First, I argue that the contemporary debate concerning the implementation of the ideal of equality within liberal democracies has been overlooking the epistemic dimension of the basis of political equality. Second, I claim that specifying the epistemic dimension of political equality has at least two important effects. a. It is important from the perspective of conceptual analysis, as it allows to properly distinguish between the normative job played by moral arguments on the one hand, and the epistemic aspects of political equality on the other hand. b. The specification of the epistemic aspects of political equality has at least on important normative upshot, namely the possibility to show that epistemic forms of injustice are detrimental to the very ideal of political equality as an essential feature of liberal conceptions of democracy

Introduction: Democracy, Diversity

The article introduces a collection of essays which represents the final outcome of a research project (Urbanitas) carried out by the authors on the theme of cultural diversity and on the political response e to the tensions and conflicts produced by the encounter of so many differences in the same democratic space

Un liberalismo per il XXI secolo: le sfide della contemporaneità

I contributi presenti in questo Quaderno di Biblioteca della Libertà intendono valutare le sfide non risolte del liberalismo, inteso sia nei termini di un paradigma socio-politico di stampo ideale-normativo, che come insieme di pratiche e istituzioni a cui ha costantemente fatto riferimento la maggior parte dei regimi democratici occidentali. Le sfide del XXI secolo richiedono un aggiornamento e ripensamento del liberalismo, che deve e dovrà rendersi disponibile anche alla possibilità di accettare revisioni radicali di alcuni dei pilastri centrali della teoria liberale. L’obiettivo primario di questo Quaderno consiste nel rivendicare l’importanza della teoria liberale, e pur tuttavia segnalare la necessità e l’urgenza di affrontare le sfide tutt’oggi irrisolte del liberalismo contemporaneo, con lucidità e flessibilità intellettuale

A multidimensional account of democratic legitimacy: how to make robust decisions in a non-idealized deliberative context

This paper analyses the possibility of granting legitimacy to democratic decisionmaking procedures in a context of deep pluralism. We defend a multidimensional account according to which a legitimate system needs to grant, on the one hand, that citizens should be included on an equal footing and acknowledged as reflexive political agents rather than mere beneficiaries of policies, and, on the other hand, that their decisions have an epistemic quality. While Estlund\u2019s account of imperfect epistemic proceduralism might seem to embody a dualistic conception of democratic legitimacy, we point out that it is not able to recognize citizens as reflexive political agents and is grounded in an idealized model of the circumstances of deliberation. To overcome these ambiguities, we develop an account of democratic legitimacy according to which disagreement is the proper expression of citizens\u2019 reflexive agency and the attribution of epistemic authority does not stem from a major expertise or specific ability, but it comes through the public confrontation among disagreeing agents. Consequently, the epistemic value of deliberation should be derived from the reasons-giving process rather than from the reference to the alleged quality of its outcomes. In this way, we demonstrate the validity of the multidimensional perspective of legitimacy, yet abstain from introducing any outcome-oriented criterion. Finally, we argue that this account of legitimacy is well suited for modeling deliberative democracy as a decision-making procedure that respects the agency of every citizen and grants her opportunity to influence public choices