The issue of human rights continues to be a battleground between divergent beliefs. Currently, it does not seem to be a unifying idea, but a cause of division that may strengthen the “clash of civilizations” or the “war of cultures”. This article stresses that the universality of human rights could only be sustained by stating the organic relation of human rights with some general facts that characterize human nature and explain why moral indignation is so common and negative reactions so widely spread when gross violations of human rights occur. This relationship can be shown by incorporating into the doctrine of human rights a general notion of “capabilities” and functioning of every “human being” and every “form of human life” as that one expressed in the texts by Sen and in Nussbaum particularly.

The dispute that divided political philosophy during the eighties into two camps, liberals versus communitarians, would now appear to be over. On both sides an atmosphere of détente seems to be prevailing over the reasons for dissent. Even an author such as Charles Larmore, one of the most well-known advocates of a strictly political view of liberalism, has recently anticipated the possibility of integrating the romantic and the communitarian legacy within the context of liberal individualism.In his latest book, The Romantic Legacy, Larmore elaborates on this possibility by analyzing four fundamental features of romanticism: imagination, a sense of belonging to a community, irony and authenticity. In this essay, the author highlights the ensuing difficulties and defends the need to maintain the liberal distinction between political and cultural rights and the corresponding separation of the respective spheres of pertinence.

The idea that citizenship is the fundamental expression of the right of membership in a territorially defined political system is usually taken for granted, both from common sense and academic theories. In political and social theory, however, is beginning to emerge the idea that citizenship can be projected beyond the borders of the nation-state. This alternative conception has taken different classification: “global citizenship”, “transnational citizenship”, “post- national citizenship”. The thesis of this article is that the proposals of deterritorialization of citizenship represent an aspiration or a goal to reach rather than a fact that is simply to record. Essentially, it is a way to defy the nation-state perspective, according to which the boundaries of the civic community necessarily coincide whit the geographic boundaries of the State.

Migrations reveal several features of the social, political, cultural and symbolical reality of the globalized world. From a purely political point-of-view they touch a raw nerve of liberal democracies: the tension existing between the adherence to the universal values of liberalism and the democratic sovereign's discretion concerning admission policies.Such tension seems to make any commitment in favour of migrant’s human rights unrealistic.The present article supports the argument that only the harmonization of migration policies that implies a cooperative and multilateral approach between the involved states can make the mobility practices carried out by they who try to cross their boundaries less dramatic.

In this reply, I try to clarify the theoretical project behind the book and respond to the critical remarks of my interlocutors. Above all, I try to illustrate what are the possible answers to the objections of a politico-philosophical nature that are made to the perspective of ‘cosmopolitan realism’, that is, cosmopolitanism without illusions, proposed by the text, and which concern the issues of ethnocentrism, the relationship with human rights, applicability and philosophical foundation.

Modern philosophical tradition has generally paid little attention to nature as an object of moral inquiry. In this tradition, only human beings are entitled to have moral rights. Recently, however, growing ecological problems and the shift from metaethics to normative ethics have changed this conceptual framework. The aim of the article is to show that, on a kantian basis, an interpersonal ethics can be applied to nature itself, precisely because, in the kantian paradigm, the rationale for excluding nature from moral citizenship are metaphisical and not persuasively moral.

The point of this essay is that the arguments advanced by thinkers like John Rawls e Michael Ignatieff in favour of a core rights to life and liberty are not consistent with their positions in favour of human rights minimalism. Just the fact that human rights minimalism implies the right to physical security and to basic freedom of movement should lead these philosophers not only to recognize both the importance and the value of other rights, but also to include certain aspects of the sphere of private life and of cultural practice in the field of international law. Human rights, that are going to become popular through international debates, compell us first to reconsider the dichotomy between public and private sphere; second, the dichotomy between social and political interests; third, the necessity of subordinating politics of human right, with no exception, either to prudential and historical convenience (see Ignatieff), or to the observance of pluralism (see Rawls).

Every attempt to unambiguously distinguish between economic and forced migrants is made more difficult by the overlapping of the reasons lying at the roots of mobility. Rarely is a single cause enough to push people to leave one's home country for another. And yet, critical analysis of the language, the taxonomies and the distinction categories is essential. The analytic distinction between self-initiated and compelled or forced migration has the advantage of drawing attention to the different value that needs to be recognized in the claims and the rights of economic migrants compared with those of refugees: the latter, differently from the former, have had no choice as for the decision of leaving and therefore they hold a specific moral right – and, in theory, also a legal one.

Many recent studies have interpreted the extraterritorialization of migratory controls in the per-spective of the state of exception. The hypothesis suggested in the essay is that border spaces are not regulated areas of void or legal suspension, but the expression of security practices in-cluded in the political guidelines of democratic states. Indeed border areas are not conceived to create a unique and unified barrier between included and excluded, but to grade the system of rights according to circumstances and situations. Therefore, the reorganization of spatial coordinates signals the emergence of a geography of security interweaving governmental approaches, management styles and diversified and flexible protocols, an integral part of the more gen-eral political and legal developments

In the boundless literature dedicated to Hannah Arendt’s thought, interpreters and commentators have rarely focussed on cosmopolitanism, even for reasons that appear well founded at first sight. Taraborrelli's book finally fills the gap. It offers a clear, coherent and systematic reconstruction of her political thought sub specie: cosmopolitanism to demonstrate how the thesis - according to which Arendt voluntarily abstained from any cosmopolitan perspective for various reasons - does not have reason to exist. To the theses proposed in the book, the commentator adds a further thesis and namely that H. Arendt's theory of action allows to focus on a look that retrieves a vision of political notions such as “bottom-up” practices through the action of they who recognize themselves as politically equal on a common meeting ground. In this case the political sphere arises directly from acting-together and sharing words and deeds despite the different positions and the resulting variety of perspectives. The most important consequence of the perspective is that its field of application is not established by state borders or legal jurisdictions, but by political action itself, whose scope extends potentially to all citizens of the world.

Sino a tempi recenti, la correzione delle diseguaglianze ascrivibili a un’ingiusta distribuzione della ricchezza e delle risorse ha rappresentato la preoccupazione normativa condivisa dalle principali teorie della giustizia sociale. Attualmente, l’attenzione dei filosofi politici sembra rivolgersi a un nuovo di tipo di rivendicazioni, così diffuse da avere occupato una parte sempre più ampia dello spazio pubblico: le “politiche dell’identità”. Il riconoscimento di identità collettive a livello pubblico, che dipende dal modo in cui le stesse minoranze hanno ridefinito che cosa significhi essere una minoranza, appare come un “bene” sociale che merita stima e apprezzamento da parte della società nel suo complesso. L’idea che ispira questo lavoro cerca però di dimostrare come non debba essere il carattere distintivo dell’appartenenza identitaria a giustificare le rivendicazioni di riconoscimento, ma come siano piuttosto le rivendicazioni di giustizia ed inclusione a poter (eventualmente) legittimare forme di trattamento differenziato dei gruppi identitari.

In recent years, vulnerability has acquired an increasingly relevant political-moral significance. Its renewed interest is due to the idea that if you focus the attention on what constitutes the ideal capable of making people's lives truly "human", a theme like the one of vulnerability represents more an obstacle to be removed in respect to a condition of perfection than a normative resource. This does not mean that you cannot approach an ethic of vulnerability without caution and some reservations. Summarising: the category of vulnerability can be used as a strategic resource of critical value able to foster transformation of the unjust social situation, or is it inevitably associated with a relationship of domination and subordination, or even of violence? The thesis of the present paper is that it is twofold. However, if included in the conceptual framework of the theory of recognition, vulnerability is not necessarily a limiting condition; rather it is an ontological feature that can help recover the intrinsic social dimension typical of the human condition.

According to several contemporary theorists of cosmopolitanism, the concept of sovereignty – enabling the political authority to be core and head of society – should be overcome. There-fore, juridical and political institutions are to be considered as mere instruments serving goods that count as desirable in specific collectives. The thesis of the paper is that liberty is always “social liberty”: the institutions enabling it are not to be added to a prepolitical liberty dimension, on the contrary they are what enables its realization. Such thesis is advanced to endorse the so-called “domestic analogy” in order to overcome anti-statist cosmopolitism objections to the idea that recognizing the equal supremacy of states is part and parcel of everyone rights to freedom respect.