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Political Liberalism
... What does democracy have to do with epistemology? According to many thinkers, not much (Rawls 1993;Waldron 1999;Posner 2003;Pettit 2012;Urbinati 2014). A democracy aspires to be a community of free and equal citizens, with procedures designed to embody moral values such as fairness, equality, and respect. ...
... Truth-tracking theories can be contrasted with purely procedural accounts of political legitimacy (Rawls 1993;Waldron 1999;Griffin 2003;Christiano 2008;Kolodny 2014). Proceduralists argue that democracy's legitimacy resides in the procedures it follows and the principles it expresses, not the outcomes it produces. ...
... However, in a diverse and pluralistic society, achieving consensus on who qualifies as a legitimate epistemic authority on political matters is an elusive goal. There is no undisputed, publicly justifiable criterion for identifying expertise, nor is there widespread agreement on which political decisions are the "right" ones (Dahl 1989;Rawls 1993;Waldron 1999;Estlund 2008). Without access to such standards, we are left with no choice but to rely on the very democratic decisions whose epistemic merits we seek to ascertain. ...
This paper examines two major challenges to epistemic theories of democracy: the “authority dilemma” and the “epistemic gamble.” The first is a conceptual challenge, suggesting that epistemic democracy is inherently self-undermining. The second is a normative challenge, asserting that the case for democracy should not rely on precarious epistemic grounds. I argue that both challenges fail, demonstrating that epistemic theories of democracy withstand these two prominent objections.
... Following Rawls's (2005) idea that society is characterized by its members having different reasonable beliefs regarding values and normative principles, as well as the idea that reasonable and democratic decision processes need to acknowledge this diversity and focus on reaching compromises motivated by rational, reasonable and respectful discussion (Weinstock 2017), the current approach relies on ethical pluralism as a theoretical foundation for the governance of generative AI in academia (Peterson 2024;Peterson and Hamrouni 2022;van den Hoven 2010). Eth-ical pluralism acknowledges the existence of multiple incompatible normative principles and values that contradict each other when facing ethical dilemmas (i.e. ...
... Accordingly, ethical pluralism cannot be used to promote the responsible or ethical way in which generative AI can (or should) be used. Ethical pluralism acknowledges that society is characterized by its members having different beliefs regarding values and norms (Rawls 2005) and, as such, it does not advocate one ethical theory in favor of another. Although it does not impose how people should behave in order to conform to an ideal of ethics, it relies on the idea that it is nonetheless reasonable to expect individuals to reach a compromise on a minimal threshold of behaviors below which it would be unreasonable to act. ...
Generative AI tools tend to be used as if they were built to gather or confirm truthful information, as if they were knowledge-based systems. As such, there is a discrepancy between how generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT) is conceived and used by the general public, and what it really is and can accomplish. Given a lack of proper legal framework and the widespread usage of these tools, organizations have raised red flags and urged academic institutions to reflect on governance principles for the use of generative AI. In this paper, we present the principles adopted by an Institutional AI committee to guide usage of generative AI, as well as the theoretical and practical considerations motivating their introduction.
... Policies must be co-created with stakeholders, especially those historically marginalized. Participation becomes a means not just of consultation, but of co-authorship-a democratic ethos consistent with Rawlsian public reason (Rawls, 1993). ...
This article explores how Rational Humanism, as formulated by Serhii Kharchuk in Humanitatis Rationalis (2024)-can be institutionalized through public policy. It argues that public policy must evolve from a technocratic, interest-based practice to an ethically grounded enterprise, anchored in philosophical rationality and human dignity. Drawing from political philosophy, ethics, deliberative democracy, and environmental justice, the article proposes a framework for integrating Rational Humanism into policymaking processes. It emphasizes participatory deliberation, universal dignity, ecological stewardship, and transgenerational responsibility as pillars for humane and sustainable governance.
... Esta concepción, no obstante, es una variante específica de la democracia: la liberal (Coppedge et al., 2020, p. 34;Diamond, 1999, pp. 10-13;Rawls, 2005). La cuestión está en que una democracia puede no ser liberal y ser todavía una democracia. ...
Los procesos graduales de autocratización han provocado que algunos regímenes se deslicen hacia la zona gris entre la democracia y el autoritarismo. ¿Cómo determinar cuál es el tipo de régimen que prevalece en cada caso? ¿Se trata de “regímenes híbridos”? Usualmente, éstos son definidos como regímenes con atributos propios de las democracias y las autocracias. Sin embargo, existe mucha confusión en el sentido y alcance de ese término. El objetivo de este artículo es distinguir entre diferentes concepciones de los regímenes híbridos en función de su coherencia conceptual. El análisis se basa en los criterios de validez, diferenciación y parsimonia, propuestos por Collier y Levitsky (1997) para la formación de conceptos y muestra las diferencias existentes en la medida en que las concepciones de regímenes híbridos cumplen con esos criterios. Los estudios asociados a la perspectiva de los “regímenes con adjetivos” ofrecen herramientas conceptuales más sistemáticas. En contraste, los trabajos que definen a los regímenes híbridos como regímenes que no son ni democracias ni autoritarismos tienen limitaciones en el plano conceptual.
... The Rawlsian plea for reasonable pluralism entails the claim that in a democratic society, diverging worldviews not only tolerate each other, but actively recognize the limitations of their own positions. As no comprehensive doctrine can reasonably be expected to be endorsed by all citizens, views cannot be forced upon others; a pluralist society and its institutional arrangements can thus only be grounded on a shared political culture in which some epistemic modesty is practiced (Rawls 1993). In a similar vein, Habermas further sketches out the requirements for pluralism in the public sphere by translating the characteristics of communicative action to the functioning of deliberative democracy (Habermas 1981). ...
Discussions on modern pluralism have mainly focused on its socio-political dimension. This article focuses on the existential-phenomenological dimension of plurality, conceiving of pluralism as a responsive relationship between the self and the other. We advance a philosophical reading of Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance in order to further give shape to this existential-phenomenological approach to pluralism. The theory of resonance offers a framework to characterize the responsive relationships at play throughout human life. We argue that Rosa’s account is promising in its contribution to thinking the concept of pluralism as responsive relationship, but we problematize how Rosa tends to reduce resonance to subjective experience rather than taking the relationship itself as a focal point. We strengthen the potential of a philosophy of resonance by further embedding it in Arendt’s philosophy of worldliness; this, we conclude, leads to a conceptualization of pluralism as the responsivity of relationships themselves rather than a function of responding entities.
... Por otro lado, Ferrajoli (2001) expone la importancia del constitucionalismo garantista, que enfatiza que la Constitución es robusta solo si incluye mecanismos efectivos para la protección de los derechos fundamentales y la limitación del poder estatal. En esta línea, Rawls (1993) sostiene que la estabilidad constitucional depende del diseño institucional, de la adhesión de la sociedad a los principios de justicia y de la equidad (todos establecidos en la Carta Magna). ...
Esta investigación analiza cómo la Constitución en un Estado se convierte en un instrumento de regulación y limitación del poder, evaluando su eficacia en la estabilidad institucional y su influencia en la consolidación del Estado de derecho. El estudio es de carácter cualitativo, adoptando el método hermenéutico para la interpretación y análisis crítico de documentos normativos, doctrinas jurídicas y estudios sobre constitucionalismo. Se clasifica como una investigación documental y descriptiva, basada en la revisión de fuentes secundarias. Uno de los principios fundamentales es la supremacía constitucional, la norma soberana que rige el ordenamiento jurídico y limita el ejercicio del poder estatal. El análisis comparativo muestra que los países con mecanismos de protección constitucional alcanzan una mayor aplicabilidad de las normativas constitucionales. En la discusión se confirma que la eficacia de la Constitución depende de una combinación de elementos jurídicos, políticos y sociales, donde los países con sistemas judiciales independientes y los tribunales constitucionales con facultades transparentes, aplican mejor la Constitución, de lo que se concluye que su eficacia depende de un equilibrio entre principios institucionales, jurídicos y políticos, y que la manipulación de estos principios puede debilitar la estructura democrática.
Upon reading Free Market Fairness , it is apparent that John Tomasi’s defence of market democracy relies on a certain conception of political personality qua citizenship in which the idea of self-authorship is afforded a primary role. With the goal of both clarifying and assessing the merits of said conception, this article begins with a delimitation of Rawls’s and John Tomasi’s account of political personhood qua citizenship. It then moves on to provide several interpretations of the central causality clause associated with Tomasi’s first moral power, favouring a so-called ontological interpretation. Building upon this, the article goes on to argue that Tomasi’s account brings to light problems of exclusivity and metapluralism which afflict, and cast doubt upon, the broader project of political liberalism.
In Croatia, 2024 was characterized by the unwillingness of the legislature to regulate women’s right to abortion with appropriate law. In the Republic of Croatia, abortion is regulated by the Law on Health Measures in Implementation of the Right to Decide on Childbirth, adopted in 1978. The law was passed when the Republic of Croatia was still part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Owing to the new constitutional and legal framework after the establishment of the Croatian state, it is clear that the law mentioned above needs to be updated and adapted to the new order. In its Ruling of February 21, 2017, the Constitutional Court ordered the Croatian Parliament to pass a new law on abortion within two years. Since there are no sanctions for the Parliament concerning noncompliance with this deadline, it is not surprising that six years after the decision of the Constitutional Court, a new law has not yet been adopted. This reluctance of the legislature is because it is an issue that deeply divides the nation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what options are available to the Croatian Parliament when a new law on abortion is adopted. The new law must comply with the Croatian constitutional order and internationally accepted obligations in protecting human rights. Contemporary trends in the regulation of abortion in the member states of the European Union and the United States of America and their possible influence on Croatian legislation will be considered.
In this paper, I argue that controversiality is a necessary feature of theology: It is a reasonable expectation that theological issues will be controversial because theology is a hermeneutical science: It seeks to justify the rational acceptability of faith within the contexts of our time. It does not seek to transform the act of faith into either uncontroversial knowledge or uncontroversial matters of taste. In this paper, I offer three arguments in support of this main thesis: The argument from the distinction between faith and knowledge, the argument from the concept of religious truth and the argument from reasonable pluralism. After these epistemological considerations which come mainly from Systematic Theology, I draw some conclusions for Practical Theology and RE at the end of the paper.
The political optimism of the immediate aftermath of the Cold War was accompanied by an upsurge in scholarly attention to the question of democratic global governance. However, the past decade and a half has seen a ‘globalization backlash’ that has eroded faith in both the feasibility and desirability of strong global institutions. These developments raise important questions for the future of research into the application of democratic principles to international governance arrangements. This article reviews three recent attempts, from Luis Cabrera, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, and Hans Agné, to theorise democracy beyond the state. The three authors converge in seeking insights into democratic global governance in the interaction of empirical and normative themes, though they also identify potentially divergent paths of inquiry for the future of the global democracy research programme.
This chapter explores the interaction between populism, social media, and political polarization within the context of Brazil, focusing on Jair Bolsonaro's strategic use of social media between 2013 and 2022. It examines how social media facilitates a shift from collective political discourse to individualized engagement, contributing to the phenomenon of departyization, the declining relevance of political parties in the digital age. Employing a qualitative methodology, the chapter integrates interdisciplinary insights from political communication, sociology, and technology studies to analyze the emergence of cyberpopulism, characterized by micro-segmentation and the exploitation of user data. By relating Bolsonaro's strategies with those of Donald Trump in the United States, this study highlights the transformative role of populist communication in fostering polarization and institutional crises. The chapter concludes with reflections on the implications for democracy in a pluralistic society.
RESUME
L'une des questions centrales qu'une théorie républicaine de la justice pénale peut aider à affronter est le choix des conduites qu'il convient de criminaliser ou de décriminaliser. Une conduite ne devrait être criminalisée que si, ce faisant, le dominion, une conception républicaine de la liberté, est accru. Un tel raisonnement inspire au républicain une décriminalisation substantielle dans les sociétés occidentales. Prenant bien le crime au sérieux, les républicains estiment que pas mal de conduites que nous traitons comme des crimes recevraient une meilleure réponse s'ils étaient, dans la voie tracée par les abolitionnistes, envisagés comme des troubles, des problèmes existentiels, des conflits appelant un dialogue. Il n'y a pas de contradiction à participer à des combats progressistes visant à clarifier la protection juridique de la femme contre le viol et celle de l'environnement contre sa spoliation, tout en déclinant la compétence du pénal à régir certaines catégories de conduites.
In today's digital era, political communication has become increasingly complex, posing significant ethical challenges. This chapter explores deep into the ethical considerations involved in creating, sharing, and consuming political messages amidst the overwhelming flow of information and the rapid spread of social media. It examines the ethical dilemmas faced by political actors like candidates, parties, and advocacy groups as they navigate between persuasion and manipulation, transparency and deception, and accountability and impunity. Through real-world examples and case studies, the chapter underscores the consequences of unethical messaging on democratic norms, public trust, and civic engagement. It also provides practical strategies and frameworks to promote ethical behavior in political communication, emphasizing integrity, honesty, and respect for diverse perspectives. Ultimately, it urges stakeholders across the political spectrum to prioritize ethics and responsibility in shaping contemporary political discourse.
O objetivo do presente artigo é verificar se há elementos consequencialistas na doutrina rawlsiana, isto é, na justiça como equidade. O primeiro passo alcançar tal objetivo é analisar a metodologia adotada por Rawls. Ou seja, apresentar e analisar a posição original, que é como Rawls denomina o seu experimento mental e os seus quatros estágios. É mediante esse procedimento que os contratantes hipotéticos ponderam, escolhem e deliberam sobre os princípios de justiça reguladores da estrutura básica da sociedade. Em outras palavras os arranjos institucionais políticos e socioeconômicos. Trata-se de identificar como opera o véu de ignorância, expediente rawlsiano que assegura a qualidade moral dos contratantes hipotéticos. Conclui-se que argumentos consequencialistas desempenham um papel relevante na justificação da escolha dos dois princípios de justiça rawlsiano, ou seja, na justiça como equidade.
Political disagreements pose a range of philosophical challenges for citizens seeking to navigate politics. Epistemologists ask about the impact of peer disagreement on the justification of individual’s beliefs. Rawls’s Political Liberalism (2005) tackles the impact of reasonable disagreement on questions of justice and legitimacy in a political community, arguing for a turn to public reason when justifying political principles. Recently these two literatures have been brought together to develop epistemic foundations of and challenges to Rawlsian political liberalism. Against these recent trends, I will argue that there are good reasons for political liberals to remain epistemically abstinent about the impact of peer disagreement on citizens’ beliefs. I also extend the lessons from analyzing public reason and peer disagreement to suggest there are more general reasons for caution in applying the epistemology of disagreement literature to cases of political disagreement.
Cooperative speech is purposive. From the speaker's perspective, one crucial purpose is the transmission of knowledge. Cooperative speakers care about getting things right for their conversational partners. This attitude is a kind of respect. Cooperative speech is an ideal form of communication because participants have respect for each other. And having respect within a cooperative enterprise is sufficient for a particular kind of moral standing: we ought to respect those who have respect for us. Respect demands reciprocity. I maintain that large language models aren't owed the kind of respect that partly constitutes a cooperative conversation. This implies that they aren't cooperative interlocutors, otherwise we would be obliged to reciprocate the attitude. Leveraging this conclusion, I argue that present-day LLMs are incapable of assertion and that this raises an overlooked doubt about their semantic competence. One upshot of this argument is that knowledge of meaning isn't just a subject for the cognitive psychologist. It's also a subject for the moral psychologist.
A distinctive question about corporate sincerity arises in two kinds of contexts. In accommodation contexts, a corporate agent expresses the sort of reasonable, conscience-constituting normative commitments that generate a claim to be exempt from a general obligation that applies to it. For this claim to be justified, it must be sincere in expressing these commitments. In moral credit contexts, a corporate agent expressly acts in a morally right (or justified) manner, but there is reason to leave open the question of whether it deserves moral credit for this. Such a question is raised when, e.g., companies are accused of reputation washing. Deserving moral credit requires companies to have been sincere in their rightful expressive actions. I argue that there is a single substrate of corporate sincerity in both contexts: A corporate agent is sincere when (i) it says or does something that is meant to be understood as expressing certain valuing attitudes and (ii) its statement or action is guided by the practical functioning of those valuing attitudes. In addition to helping us evaluate corporate agents in accommodation or moral credit contexts, this account promises to shed light on the broader relational import of corporate sincerity appraisals.
Homeschooling is on the rise. It appeals to very different perspectives and ideologies that tend not to have common ground, from classical conservative to radical progressive. But the justifications for the practice are weak. In this paper, we build a case against the “home school” as a political practice using the existing commitments of liberal, conservative, and democratic theories of education. Whether education should aim at the cultivation of children's autonomy, their formation as members of cultural communities, or their training as democratic citizens, there are reasons to doubt that the practice of homeschooling can fulfill our educational goals. As such, we argue that liberals, conservatives, and democrats each have their own motivations to oppose homeschooling as an institutional alternative to traditional schools. Through our critiques, we also advance a metatheoretical argument in favor of centering the aims of education in our philosophical and political debates.
Why do judges disagree about judicial reasoning – i.e., the use of legal reasoning in adjudication – and how can such disagreement be studied empirically? We propose a general theory of variation in judicial reasoning that focuses on a core element of legal analysis – the choice of authoritative sources. In particular, we argue that source-based disagreement is likely to manifest itself on two dimensions: The degree to which extra-national versus national and extra-legislative versus legislative sources should be relied on. Where judges place themselves on these dimensions have important normative implications for the origin of and power over law, and in particular the status and power of the national legislator. We demonstrate the strength and usefulness of our theory with original data from more than 3400 judicial opinions of the Swedish Supreme Court over a 40-year period. We find that Justices’ backgrounds, in terms of when they went to law school and professional pre-appointment experience, are correlated with their placement on these two dimensions in theoretically expected ways.
The concept of time poverty is useful for investigating the widely reported exacerbation of gender inequality in families during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. I explore the nature and frequency of this situation in Ontario, Canada to assess domestic inequality, free time, and gendered wellbeing as issues of social justice. Between January and June, 2021, I administered online time use surveys to 100 self-identified women and 100 self-identified men who were living with a spouse and had at least one child learning remotely. The combined responsibilities for the household, childcare, and children’s online learning were overwhelming for the vast majority of women. Consequently, their general experience in the context of the pandemic was one of intensified “time poverty,” a condition I conceptualize as incorporating paid work, the “patriarchal dividend” in domestic task allocation, the endless nature of feminized care-related responsibilities, and women’s consequent lack of recuperative leisure. I assess the nature of leisure, its importance to wellbeing, and the impact of its shortage on women’s lives. Finally, I consider theories of social justice that can illuminate and rectify the imbalances entrenched in gendered divisions of labour within families. The study contributes to pandemic and time poverty literatures, and to the social justice literature by identifying time poverty as an aspect of social injustice in the pandemic context.
The article examines the principles of stability and civil disobedience in unity to contrast them with a current idea that the principle of peace is a formal ideal of law, while justice is its substantive but relative ideal. The proposed alternative, emphasizing the problems of stability, highlights its conceptual uniqueness and its political significance, which theories of justice and theories of peace, but also theories of law, do not pay attention to.
This chapter addresses the significant challenge posed by historical events and contemporary scandals that have cast a negative shadow on the credibility of the Christian proposal. The analysis seeks to address both a past stained by many negative episodes and a present marked by corruption and abuse, both of which discourage the reception of the Christian message, and proposes strategies to deal with this negative burden and with current misconceptions and attitudes. It examines the revision of the historical record; comparative strategies; ideological critique; revisions on religion and fanaticism; the right theology of history; and the need for apology and reconciliation with the past.
This Handbook brings together contributions from leading scholars of constitutional theory, with backgrounds in law, philosophy and political science. Its sixty chapters not only offer an exceptional survey of the field but also provide a major contribution to it. The book explores three main areas. First, the values upheld by a constitution, including rights, freedom, equality, dignity and well-being. Second, the modalities of a constitutional system, such as the separation of powers, democratic representation and the rule of law. Finally, the institutions through which it operates, both legal and political, including courts, elections, parliaments and international organisations. It also considers the challenges confronting constitutional arrangements from growing inequality, populism, climate change and migration.
This Handbook brings together contributions from leading scholars of constitutional theory, with backgrounds in law, philosophy and political science. Its sixty chapters not only offer an exceptional survey of the field but also provide a major contribution to it. The book explores three main areas. First, the values upheld by a constitution, including rights, freedom, equality, dignity and well-being. Second, the modalities of a constitutional system, such as the separation of powers, democratic representation and the rule of law. Finally, the institutions through which it operates, both legal and political, including courts, elections, parliaments and international organisations. It also considers the challenges confronting constitutional arrangements from growing inequality, populism, climate change and migration.
This paper provides an alternative to Rawlsian public reason liberalism and the constraints it imposes on religious reasoning in debates on public bioethics: the conscientious engagement model from the Reformational tradition. First, it explains the Rawlsian concept of liberal restraint on religious public reasoning for coercive laws and discusses objections to this concept. Using this as a frame, it then presents a case study of euthanasia and assisted suicide ( eas ) in the Netherlands and the advocacy of faith-based organizations ( fbo s) to prevent a new legal framework for eas for nonmedical reasons through the Completed Life Bill (2020). Lastly, it examines the Christian imperative and explores the anthropological notion of embodiment as a basis for bioethical policy. The paper’s leading question is this: How may fbo s participate in public debates over bioethical issues to influence coercive laws in liberal democracies in a way that respects pluralism but rejects relativism?
Debates on assisted dying remain controversial and call out for conceptual clarification. What is the moral basis for assessing competing arguments, and what is the best way to frame these arguments in terms of actual and potential human rights? This article aims to investigate whether autonomy alone suffices as a moral source for human rights and whether, on this basis, there should be a positive human right to assisted dying, and a negative human right to assist others in dying. Drawing upon discussions in political theory, medical ethics, and human rights scholarship, the article develops an account of autonomy as multidimensional and subject to trade-offs. Autonomy is divided into the dimensions of liberty, opportunity, capacity, and authenticity. Furthermore, there is a common intuition that human beings ought to be endowed with a domain of core autonomy that must never be compromised in any trade-off. This analytical framework is used to map conflicts and trade-offs concerning assisted dying. By way of conclusion, it is argued that autonomy suffices to describe what human rights protect, but not why they do so. Furthermore, it is argued that the terminology of rights used in debates on assisted dying risks misrepresenting what the debate is actually about, and that the debate should be framed in terms of the right to health and exceptions to the right to life, rather than general rights related to assisted dying. Thus, assisted dying should be seen as an extreme option, where death is not the end, but the means, and ought to be considered alongside other means, as a last resort, already in the legislative process.
A consensus is emerging in the philosophy of science that value judgements are ineliminable from scientific inquiry. Which values should then be chosen by scientists? This paper proposes a novel answer to this question, labelled the public reason view. To place this answer on firm ground, I first redraw the boundaries of the political forum; in other words, I broaden the range of actors who have a moral duty to follow public reason. Specifically, I argue that scientific advisors to policy makers have that duty—a duty that is needed to create a barrier against any nonpublic values that scientific researchers might let enter their work. Next, I specify how scientific advisors should approach value judgements to satisfy public reason, arguing that they should work within a conception of justice that is political and reasonable in several distinct senses. Scientific researchers at large should instead communicate their value judgements by following norms of transparency that facilitate scientific advisors’ public reasoning. Finally, I contrast my account with the dominant response to the which-values question, which focuses instead on citizens’ values, demonstrating that that response shares several problematic features with the heavily criticised external conception of public reason.
This paper examines how the biostatistical theory (BST), as endorsed by Norman Daniels’ account of just health, can be integrated with the capabilities approach to address the ‘lowering functioning objection’. This objection argues that the BST could mistakenly define a population as healthier if the prevalence of a certain pathology increases and becomes the new statistical norm. To tackle this issue and offer a more coherent and normatively robust account of just health, the paper introduces a two-tiered model. The first tier retains the biostatistical model to provide a non-comprehensive, evidence-based foundation for health, focusing on the distribution of biological functionings within a population. The second tier introduces a capabilitarian survey that normatively assesses whether the new statistical norm supports or hinders the achievement of valuable capabilities. This integration enables a more holistic, flexible, pluralistic and context-sensitive understanding of health, framing it as a quasi-normative meta-capability—namely, a capability grounded in biological functionings but not reducible to them, which is essential for achieving other valuable capabilities. After explaining the rationale for this integration and outlining a Rawlsian-inspired approach to selecting valuable capabilities, I conclude by suggesting the implications of this model for Daniels’ theory.
Recent republican debates about judicial review have focused on whether courts deliver legitimate forms of political contestation about rights. These ‘political constitutionalists’ frame the separation of powers as a matter of ‘friction’. The rival approach emphasizes whether the expertise and capacity of courts can ‘efficiently’ get certain jobs done to secure different ends. These rival approaches inform debates about judicial review and bills of rights. This article argues that emphasizing political contestation fails to address the problem of complicity between the branches. Judicial politics in the USA, Canada, the UK and New Zealand suggests that judicial complicity with the political branches lets political actors escape democratic accountability for policy choices related to rights. Courts enable this by abusing the power to interpret law to help political factions protect or reform the status quo. As such, liberty can have something to fear from the judiciary when it does not act alone.
Zoning severely limits what individuals can do with their private property. There is also empirical evidence that zoning contributes to the housing affordability crisis. There are good reasons to be skeptical of zoning, yet it is ubiquitous. What (if anything) can justify this widespread yet dubious practice? I critically examine one argument in this paper. The argument says zoning is justified because it facilitates autonomy. After a charitable reconstruction of the argument, I present what I think is a decisive objection to it. While the autonomy defense of zoning ultimately fails, the analysis provides insight into a related topic: gentrification. Many articulate what's wrong with gentrification by arguing that it inhibits autonomy. Reflections on zoning and autonomy show that this claim must be curtailed and common remedies to the problem of gentrification reconsidered.
Nicholas Norman-Krause argues, in this authoritative and sophisticated new treatment of conflict, that contestation is a basic - potentially regenerative - aspect of any flourishing democratic politics. In developing a distinctive 'agonistic theology,' and relating the political theory of agonism to social and democratic life, the author demonstrates that the conflicts of democracy may have a beneficial significance and depend at least in part on faith traditions and communities for their successful negotiation. In making his case, he deftly examines a rich range of religious and secular literatures, whether from the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and Stanley Cavell or from less familiar voices such as early modern jurist and political thinker Johannes Althusius and twentieth-century Catholic social philosopher Yves Simon. Liberationists including Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King, Jr. are similarly recruited for a theological account of conflict read not just as concomitant to, but also as constitutive of, democratic living.
Abstract: This study offers a detailed examination of political party
manifestos in the Western Balkans. It analyzes the main parties' manifestos for
four countries: Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. The
research identifies the major political parties' thematic priorities by
quantitatively analyzing their national manifestos.
The normative challenge of AI alignment centres upon what goals or values ought to be encoded in AI systems to govern their behaviour. A number of answers have been proposed, including the notion that AI must be aligned with human intentions or that it should aim to be helpful, honest and harmless. Nonetheless, both accounts suffer from critical weaknesses. On the one hand, they are incomplete: neither specification provides adequate guidance to AI systems, deployed across various domains with multiple parties. On the other hand, the justification for these approaches is questionable and, we argue, of the wrong kind. More specifically, neither approach takes seriously the need to justify the operation of AI systems to those affected by their actions – or what this means for pluralistic societies where people have different underlying beliefs about value. To address these limitations, we propose an alternative account of AI alignment that focuses on fair processes. We argue that principles that are the product of these processes are the appropriate target for alignment. This approach can meet the necessary standard of public justification, generate a fuller set of principles for AI that are sensitive to variation in context, and has explanatory power insofar as it makes sense of our intuitions about AI systems and points to a number of hitherto underappreciated ways in which an AI system may cease to be aligned.
The proposed reflection, on the possibilities of understanding legal validity within the limits of law, will concentrate on questioning the frontier(s) between juridicity and ajuridicity, considering the intentional relevance of semiotic approaches, but without searching for a narratively justified exposition of such frontier(s), nor for a constitutive heteronomy of substantially binding morality (or moralities), as the foundational and determinant signification of juridicity. It focuses rather on a reflexive critique of the postmodern “promises of legal semiotics” (Jack Balkin), and, in addition, looks for a metanormative and normative comprehension of the substantially filtered and intersubjectively stated—and axiologically and dialogically constituting—foundation(s) and content(s) of juridicity. Intending to discuss whether autonomous material foundations—rather than meanings(-senses)—of law can actually be (or not) asserted at the present time (A. Castanheira Neves)—in face of the growing plurality and complexity of ways of life, and, therefore, of comprehensions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity.
O objetivo desse artigo é enfocar a ideia de razão pública de John Rawls, enquanto a principal novidade de sua concepção política da justiça como equidade. Com essa ideia, o filósofo abre possibilidades para que a sua concepção política da justiça como equidade assegure a "reconciliação" entre as diferentes doutrinas abrangentes razoáveis, porém, incompatíveis entre si. Rawls define a razão pública como a maneira como uma sociedade política formula seus planos e toma suas decisões, segundo uma ordem de prioridade. Mas a razão pública é também a capacidade que a sociedade política tem de agir dessa maneira. Com isso, a razão pública é vista como uma faculdade intelectual e moral que está enraizada nas capacidades de seus cidadãos. Buscamos desenvolver este artigo apresentando, primeiramente, a visão de John Rawls acerca da razão pública e as novidades advindas desse conceito no contexto de uma concepção política da justiça. Em seguida, indicamos qual é o objeto e o conteúdo da razão pública de Rawls, bem como quais as suas diferenças em relação a razão não-pública. Na sequência, abordamos como Rawls enfrentou as dificuldades e as críticas feitas à ideia de razão pública.
This chapter examines the ideological dimensions of political correctness (PC), arguing that it serves as a mechanism to protect and further liberalism, particularly the values of individual liberty and equality. While debates on PC often contrast post-modern defenders of speech regulation for social justice with Enlightenment liberals who advocate for open discourse and scientific rationality, this dichotomy is flawed. Both camps use PC to shield liberalism from illiberal truth-claims, albeit through different strategies. Post-modernists overtly regulate speech under the banner of liberating tolerance, while Enlightenment liberals employ subtler methods, such as marginalising or ignoring illiberal perspectives within liberal science. Furthermore, the chapter explores the distinction between liberalism and Enlightenment rationality, revealing that the latter can exist in non-liberal moral frameworks. Ultimately, the socio-academic debate on PC is not about rejecting or endorsing it but about determining the most effective ways to safeguard liberal values, underscoring the circular and self-reinforcing nature of these discussions.
"The author focuses the reflection on the link between local cultural values and projects of economic development in light of Sen’s capability approach. He argues what people believe and value facilitate the passage from the universal conception of economic development to feasibility of development at the local level. Through 12 case studies, the book illustrates how the theoretical framework of Sen’s capability approach, namely the definition of freedom to self-determination and the definition of development as the expansion of people’s freedoms, applies in practice."
Many prominent theoretical defenses of multiculturalism are applications of more general liberal, libertarian, democratic or egalitarian theories to specific issues related to diversity. But not all theories of multiculturalism are like this. The so-called Bristol School of Multiculturalism (BSM) seems to be an example of another kind of approach, since its prominent representatives, such as Bhikhu Parekh and Tariq Modood, stress that their multiculturalism does not presuppose liberal principles. This raises questions about how we should understand such defenses of multiculturalism, which Modood on several occasions has labelled as “political multiculturalism”. The chapter considers a number of interpretations of what might characterize “political multiculturalism” as a type of theoretical defense of multiculturalism and shows how the BSM exemplifies these. This leads to questions about the normative implications of political approaches, and whether and how the different political approaches fit together.
Au cours des vingt premières années du XXIe siècle, les assemblées tirées au sort ont connu un essor dans les pays de l’OCDE. Dans un contexte de crise de confiance au sein des démocraties représentatives électorales, elles sont utilisées pour faire contribuer plus étroitement les citoyens à la conception des politiques publiques. En outre, des auteurs de théorie politique proposent de leur donner un rôle plus important au sein des parlements. Cependant, nous manquons d’une théorie politique normative permettant de guider et de justifier les choix d’organisation des assemblées tirées au sort. Ce mémoire définit un répertoire de procédures de référence en les rapportant de façon systématique à un quadrige de critères dont l’importance peut faire consensus : la légitimité, la justice, la sagesse et la souveraineté.
Informed by the decision by the Albertinum Museum in Dresden,
Germany, to create public events and exhibitions responding to claims by individuals who had targeted its director as part of a far-right campaign and Nancy Fraser’s argument that public institutions are to regulate social interaction and promote parity of participation, the article proposes the concept of audience pluralisation. Considering the increasingly divided contexts in which cultural oorganisations operate and in particular the rise of illiberal actors, this idea highlights their potential to be facilitators of the management of cultural disagreement in plural societies by building bridges between opposing cultural claims and, thus, of not only cultural but also sociopolitical regeneration. This requires overcoming the tendency towards short-termism that characterises the relationship between cultural organisations and their audiences, and revisiting classic discussions and paradigms in cultural policy, particularly: democratisation of culture, cultural democracy, audience development and audience engagement.
Samuel Bagg's The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy is an excellent book. It lays out and defends, in detail, an ambitious new account of the significance of democratic institutions and practices, which it sees as centrally concerned with avoiding state capture. That account powerfully illuminates many important topics in democratic theory, responding in persuasive and novel ways to old questions as well as offering new areas to explore. However, its near-exclusive focus on domination by the very wealthy may limit the insights it can provide. The idea of state capture's full power may only be made available though by adopting a more varied account of the common good that it stymies, and of the interests that may mobilize against those shared interests.
Ulrike Guérot entwirft in „The Missing Denominator“ eine Vision einer europäischen Republik, deren vermeintliche Stärke – ihr universalistischer Anspruch – zugleich ihre Achillesferse offenbart. Ihre Diagnose des demokratischen Defizits Europas ist dabei durchaus treffend und ihr Bestreben, demokratische Legitimität zu stärken, verdient Anerkennung. Die Spannung in ihrem Universalismus entsteht jedoch dadurch, dass er mit der lebendigen Vielfalt des Konkreten in ein produktives Verhältnis treten müsste, um seine Legitimationskraft zu entfalten. Ein universelles Konzept, das über historische, kulturelle und gesellschaftliche Differenzen hinwegzusehen versucht, untergräbt paradoxerweise sein eigenes Fundament. Nietzsche würde in diesem Streben nach Universalität jenen „Willen zum System“ erkennen, der die unbequeme Komplexität des Lebens durch abstrakte Schematisierung zu fassen versucht – ein Unterfangen, das stets an den Rändern der Wirklichkeit an seine Grenzen stößt. Als Gegenentwurf präsentiert diese Arbeit eine kybernetische Demokratie, die nicht auf statischen universalistischen Prinzipien, sondern auf dynamischen, selbstorganisierenden Netzwerken basiert. Sie löst sich von binären Entscheidungsmustern und erblüht in Systemen der Resonanz, Rückkopplung und kollektiver Intelligenz, inspiriert von der Weisheit natürlicher Prozesse und fundiert in den empirischen Erkenntnissen der vergleichenden Demokratieforschung.
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