Conceptions of Press Freedom in a Globalising World

Article to accompany a talk given on 22 October 2008 at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas

Reading Kant from a Catholic Horizon: Ethics and the Anthropology of Grace

For two centuries Catholic philosophers and theologians have generally treated Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy as incompatible with principles fundamental to Catholic accounts of the human condition in relation to God. This article argues that contemporary scholarship—particularly about the role of anthropological concerns in the critical project—indicates that Kant's understanding of finite human freedom provides a basis for Catholic theology to engage his thinking positively in the articulation of a theology of grace for humanity's postmodern context. </jats:p

El derecho al desarrollo en el sistema de derechos humanos: Entre los derechos de la personalidad y la actividad del Estado

El presente artículo pretende justificar la necesidad de fundamentar adecuadamente el derecho al libre desarrollo de la personalidad desde una perspectiva ética y filosófico-jurídica. Sin embargo, al igual que sucede con los demás derechos humanos de nueva generación, el derecho al desarrollo también adolece de una manifiesta falta de concreción conceptual, lo cual no es una razón suficiente para comprometer dicha fundamentación, ni tampoco para impedir la eficaz puesta en práctica de un derecho con una dimensión ético-jurídica tan universa

On Being and Becoming an Animal: Engelhardt’s Two Notions of Animality

The principal objective of this essay is to briefly present and discuss what could be thought of as Engelhardt's two approaches on animality. The first, rather literal use of the term, refers to non-rational animals stricto sensu, while the second and more important one thematizes humanity's ontological self-degradation resulting from the dominant pleasure-oriented culture of our time. As for the first, aiming to moderate his outright acceptance of animal use, I invoke Dworkin's insights on sanctity, which substantiate a plausible alternative stance. As for the second, I attempt to critically reconstruct the way in which, according to Engelhardt, humanity, having rejected every transcendent inquiry, is increasingly embracing its lower nature. In conclusion, I will hint that this return to animality may be impeded by upcoming challenges that already leave a noticeable imprint on a global scale

Nuria Sánchez Madrid, Paula Satne (Eds.). (2018). Construyendo la autonomía, la autoridad y la justicia. Leer a Kant con Onora O’Neill. Valencia, VC: Tirant Humanidades. 286 p.

Las editoras Nuria Sánchez Madrid y Paula Satne ofrecen con el presente libro una novedad en la literatura castellana sobre las discusiones de la filosofía kantiana, dado que es la primera vez que se ofrece en este idioma un conjunto de trabajos destinados a discutir las perspectivas de Onora O´Neill.El libro se abre con un prefacio escrito por O´Neill, en el cual ella realiza un recorrido por su trayectoria intelectual, teniendo en cuenta el contexto en el que se ha desarrollado su filosofía práctica y especialmente sus contribuciones a las discusiones éticas y políticas. En lo que sigue nos serviremos de este prefacio para tomar de allí los principales ejes temáticos con los que discuten críticamente los artículos que conforman esta edición.

Budget support, conditionality and poverty

This paper examines the effectiveness of budget support aid as an anti-poverty instrument. We argue that a major determinant of this effectiveness is the element of trust – or `social capital´, as it may be seen – which builds up between representatives of the donor and recipient. Thus we model the conditionality processes attending budget support aid, not purely in the conventional way as a non-cooperative two-person game, but rather as a non-cooperative game which may mutate into a collaborative equilibrium if sufficient trust between the negotiating parties builds up. Whether or not this happens is, we argue, fundamental to the effectiveness of conditionality, and of budget support aid. This then requires us to enquire into the determinants of trust, which - we empirically demonstrate - derive from the experience of the negotiating parties with one another, from the incentives they are able to provide to trust one another and from the processes within which their negotiations are conducted. The model is tested against two samples: extensively against a broad sample of all African countries undergoing budget support operations and intensively against a narrow sample of Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia. The statistical analysis suggests that trust has in practice been achieved not only through a positive `social history´ but by the transmission of forward-looking `signals´ or `bona fides´ concerning fundamentals: high pro-poor expenditure, low military expenditure, and low corruption show a positive relationship with growing trust (measured in terms of freedom from programme interruptions). Where these signals are present, budget support aid is in general growing, and slippage on overt conditionality is in general forgiven; but there are exceptions to this trend, as our case-study analysis demonstrates . A proactive stance in defence of a pro-poor strategy is positive for trust, as are certain procedural reforms including the presence of an IMF resident mission and frequent face-to-face meetings between negotiators for donor and recipient. High trust generates stability of aid, and stability of aid, in conjunction with its level and its targeting, significantly influences growth and poverty outcomes

On Actualist and Fundamental Public Justification in Political Liberalism

Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and fundamental. It is actualist in that it fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification