Responding to Disagreement in Liberal Societies: Legitimacy, Respect, Toleration

Consider the nature of disagreement about the legal permissibility of abortion within a democratic society. For the purposes of this thesis, it has two important features: it is a disagreement about matters of value, and it takes place among people who, because it is a democratic state, are all entitled to have a say (in some form) on the matter. This means some participants in the debate will have normative requirements imposed on them to which they have reasons to object. What is the correct moral response to this fact as a matter of political philosophy? One of the most influential currents in contemporary political philosophy, political liberalism, holds that disagreements of this kind can be addressed success-fully within a single polity if the state is legitimate, i.e., if it is capable of providing a set of public reasons justifying its authority. Because the reasons are public and accessible to people holding a plurality of different but reasonable conceptions of value, reasonable citizens holding these conceptions will face normative requirements that they will believe are acceptable. Chapters 1-3 of this thesis show this optimistic expectation about what citizen’s reasonableness entails for legitimacy and disagreement are ill-founded. I restore some optimism in the second half of the dissertation by arguing that there are key values we can appeal to in plausibly responding to the existence of value-disagreement. These include the central liberal notions of equal respect and toleration, theories of which I set out in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. I elaborate a conception of each concept based on the insight that they are fundamental attitudes citizens need to develop in order for a just society to exist and remain stable. I conclude, in Chapter 6, by showing that this insight can help us design good policies in responding to the fact of value-disagreement when dealing with how we should accommodate conscientious reasons for rejecting a state requirement

Rawls contra Rawls: legitimacy, normative impact, and the basic structure

Neste artigo, estabeleço um contraste entre duas abordagens à legitimidade política, ambas influenciadas por Rawls. Uma é a imagem clássica do liberalismo político, de acordo com a qual um estado é legítimo se os seus elementos constitucionais essenciais pudessem ser aceites por cidadãos razoáveis. A alternativa é a ideia de que o que faz um estado legítimo é primariamente o seu sucesso em organizar a estrutura básica de uma tal maneira que seja demonstravelmente favorável aos governados. Mais em particular, eu sugiro que um estado é legítimo na medida em que organiza a estrutura básica de uma forma que torne mais fácil para os seus cidadãos comportarem-se de forma justa uns com os outros e fazerem escolhas autónomas. Em seguida, passo a demonstrar a superioridade desta solução ao problema da legitimidade, em termos do seu impacto normativo, face à solução proposta pelo liberalismo político, mesmo quando se leva em conta um desacordo razoável sobre a questão da justiça.In this paper, I contrast two approaches to political legitimacy, both influenced by Rawls. One is the classic political liberal picture, according to which a state is legitimate if its “constitutional essentials” could be endorsed by reasonable citizens. The alternative is the idea that what makes a state legitimate is primarily its success at organizing the basic structure in a way that is demonstrably favorable to the governed. Specifically, I suggest that a state is legitimate insofar as it organizes the basic structure in a manner that makes it easier for citizens to behave justly towards one another and adopt autonomous choices. I then move to demonstrate the superiority of this normative impact solution to the problem of legitimacy vis-à-vis political liberalism, even when reasonable disagreement about justice is factored in

Vietnam – A general study of the triangulation toward change: social movements, economic development, and political changeover. An overview on the Vietnamese political development between internal movements and external constraints

The 1986 Economic Reform (Doi Moi) can be considered a watershed in Vietnamese history. The resulting development has also had a notable impact on society, where a more solid economic base has enabled the development of the middle class, a necessary condition for the growth of civil society. While the political system still defends a collectivist model, economic liberalism is bringing the Vietnamese people closer to a growing form of individualism. This thesis aims to study the political change taking place in Vietnam. The analysis was based on a thorough systematic review, including the main articles and data on the topic. The analytic perspective adopted was that of polyarchy, which acted as a lens subsequently used to answer two questions. First: What are the points of contact between economic development, political liberalization, and civil society? And second: What political factors lead to the consideration of Vietnam as a polyarchy? Finally, through a consideration of the internal and external contexts in which the country is situated, the thesis proposes a partial re-evaluation of the Vietnamese one-party model, making proposals for future trends in civil society and government behaviour

Involutions of the second kind on finitary incidence algebras

Let $K$ be a field and $X$ a connected partially ordered set. In the first part of this paper, we show that the finitary incidence algebra $FI(X,K)$ of $X$ over $K$ has an involution of the second kind if and only if $X$ has an involution and $K$ has an automorphism of order $2$. We also give a characterization of the involutions of the second kind on $FI(X,K)$. In the second part, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for two involutions of the second kind on $FI(X,K)$ to be equivalent in the case where $char K\neq 2$ and every multiplicative automorphism of $FI(X,K)$ is inner

Un universo dentro de otro

“Se va a llamar Territorio de Palabras. Deberá tener un color o dos. Además, tendrá una tipografía en particular. Habrá imágenes; muchas. Será pensada, editada y tendrá una estructura. Será una revista”. Esa fue la idea. Y había que ponerla en marcha. (Párrafo extraído del texto a modo de resumen)Facultad de Periodismo y Comunicación Socia

Classification of involutions on finitary incidence algebras of non-connected posets

Let $FI(X,K)$ be the finitary incidence algebra of a non-connected partially ordered set $X$ over a field $K$ of characteristic different from $2$. For the case where every multiplicative automorphism of $FI(X,K)$ is inner, we present necessary and sufficient conditions for two involutions on $FI(X,K)$ to be equivalent

Corrective Duties/Corrective Justice

In this paper, I assess critically the recent debate on corrective duties across moral and legal philosophy. Two prominent positions have emerged: the Kantian rights-based view (holding that what triggers corrections is a failure to respect others' right to freedom) and the so-called continuity view (correcting means attempting to do what one was supposed to do before). Neither position, I try to show, offers a satisfactory explanation of the ground (why correct?) and content (how to correct?) of corrective duties. In the final section, I suggest that it is probably better to restrict the label “corrective duties” to duties generated by interpersonal wronging