This paper gives the outline of an argument for the viability and desirability of an antifoundationalist approach to human rights and liberalism. The conception of normativity which frames my argument stands on the intuition, central in the second Wittgenstein and in the American pragmatist tradition, that accepting the ultimate circularity of our justifications does not condemn us to the corrosive consequences of radical scepticism. The conception of liberalism I prospect is centred on the deliberative democratic ideal that the best way to live with difference and conflict is to subordinate decisions of collective interests to public deliberation, which equally respects everybody’s freedom and dignity, and maintains its outcomes and principles open to revision. I will argue that an anti-foundationalist conception of normativity is the most suitable for the fuller realisation of this deliberative democratic ideal, and that a society inspired by this ideal creates the most favourable conditions for the fuller flourishing of human potentialities in any area of life. I will also point out that a volitional and discursive conception of normativity enables us to focus our efforts on the concrete political and moral obstacles to the creation of a free and equal society, thus enabling us to release the tensions between the universalistic claims of human rights and democracy and the particularistic claims of recognition raised by different cultural groups.

This paper aims at illustrating how from the works of John Rawls we can see emerging a viable anti-foundationalist cosmopolitan and deliberative democratic approach to liberalism. I shall argue that, despite what some of his critics believe, Rawls’s liberal theory of justice (1) is not concerned with foundational preoccupations (e.g. Michael Sandel); (2) does not ignore concrete processes of collective deliberation over matters of public interests (e.g. Amy Guttman, Dennis Thomson, Brian Barry); (3) nor does it endorse rigid limits to the scope of democratic deliberation (e.g. Jeremy Waldron, John Gray, Richard Bellamy). Yet I shall claim, following Andrew Kuper, that (4) there is a real risk of infringing individuals’ primary moral significance in trying to stretch too much the limits of liberal toleration in order to accommodate political liberalism with multiculturalism in the international sphere.

This paper argues through a close reading of Alasdair Macintyre’s works on justice and rationality that his reflections on the matter, despite their initial anti-liberal and foundationalist intent, have led him to endorse something close to an anti-foundationalist liberal position like that emerging from the works of neo-pragmatists philosophers such Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam and John Rawls. This is a position that regards rationality as internal to traditions, without taking this as a reason for thinking that we are irrationally trapped within the boundaries traced by the norms and standards of our own traditions. Instead, it regards us as able to transcend those boundaries through a conversational and fallibilistic use of reason, which makes us ready to revise our conceptual and evaluative horizons through open confrontation with other traditions. In order to illustrate this contention, the paper will have to disentangle the irresolvable and overlapping tensions between foundationalist and anti-foundationalist inclinations, and between anti-liberal and liberal ones, that deeply permeate his thought.

The article attempts to clarify the main issues underlying the debate between Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, with a view to showing how it is possible to see emerging from it a viable anti-foundationalist conception of normativity capable to eschew the corrosive pitfalls of radical scepticism and relativism. It is argued that this conception is centred on three key distinctions: between a physical and grammatical sense of the impossibility of foundationalism; between a view of the universalistic aspirations of normativity as grounds for our normative judgments as opposed to their scope; and between a view of the transcendent aspirations of normativity as self-transcendence as opposed to self-reflexivity.

The paper illustrates the desirability of an anti-foundationalist approach to normativity for the fullest realization of the liberal democratic project. The first section defends the viability, epistemic and normative, of an anti-foundationalism inspired to the antimetaphysical and anti-sceptical legacy of the founders of American pragmatism. The second section, drawing on the deliberative turn in democratic theory and the capability approach to autonomy, introduces what I regard to be the normative core of liberal democracy. The third section fleshes out the desirability argument by looking at how a pragmatist approach to normativity allows liberal democracies to address in a fully deliberative spirit the challenges posed by the growing cultural diversity of contemporary societies associated with contemporary processes of globalization.