Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2021) XXIII/3

This article takes up Brian Barry’s suggestion that ‘Somebody could write an article on “A Theory of Justice as Rorschach Test”’. Turning Barry’s suggestion back onto his own work, and that of other influential interpreters who shaped the reception of Rawls in analytic political philosophy, it argues that these readers approached Theory with preconceived notions of the methods of analytic philosophy and the nature of a liberal theory. Whether as largely sympathetic or critical readers, they found in Theory the articulation of a liberal individualist political ideology resting on Kantian moral foundations that provided philosophical support for the capitalist welfare state. But alongside this dominant line of interpretation, one can also unearth a counter-narrative. If one allows one’s preconceived notions of what a liberal theory in the analytic tradition should look like to be challenged, an alternative picture of Rawls can emerge. On this alternative view, Rawls has a holistic approach to justification with roots in post-analytic philosophy and the tradition of German idealism and his theory takes forward an idealist tradition of thought that stretched from Rousseau, Kant and Hegel up to Bernard Bosanquet.

In his book on ethics and ambiguity Adriano Fabris suggests a positive conception of ambiguity, whose fecondity is based on an ethical resistence to totalization.

My aim here is to provide a context within which we can develop an applied ethical criticism of narrative art – one which has a public relevance and is not limited to philosophical discussions characterized by value-interaction debate or conducted under the theoretical banner of aesthetic cognitivism. In the first part I reinforce the challenge of finding empirical evidence which either corroborates or denies the cognitivist’s claim regarding the causal impact of art on the audience, and I argue, in the second part, that such evidence is needed in order to determine the possibility of moral corruption and/or moral enhancement via art. Taking cues from Ted Nannicelli, I end by offering pointers on domains of research we should incorporate into our ethical criticism of art, so as to come up with an informed understanding of an artwork and of spectators’ engagements with it.

This essay begins by offering a brief, but perhaps needed, biographical sketch of John Rawls, so as to foreground very unique personal dimensions of his approach to the question of justice as fairness in terms of the “sense of justice.” It is argued that Rawls philosophical motivation was guided by an embodied and felt sense of justice. Then, the author discusses four striking aspects of A Theory of Justice in light of the most recent scholarship on Rawls’s development and historical background. The author then discusses the Kantian sources of Rawls project, but also how the both differ. The essay concludes with a consideration of Rawls’ claim that A Theory of Justice should be understood as “a philosophical conception for a constitutional democracy.” Should we read A Theory of Justice as a theory of justice tout court, or merely as a philosophical explication of the principles that guide constitutional democracies?

This article offers a reply to the criticisms and challenges posed by Camila Vergara, Miguel Vatter, Mariana Velasco-Rivera, Yaniv Roznai, Roberto Gargarella and Zoran Oklopcic to Constituent Power and the Law. The reply is presented in six sections covering the following themes: (1) Rousseau’s primary assemblies and the role of the Legislator; (2) the distinction between sovereignty and constituent power; (3) the types of political practices that can be attributed to the constituent people; (4) the limits of the primary constituent power; (5) the role of constitutional and political history in the book; and (6) the nature of the claim that constituent power should be understood as a juridical concept.

Whether or how a constitution’s guarantees respecting basic right and liberties are to take effect in “horizontal” cases, those involving relations among persons and groups outside of government, has been and remains a matter of debate in liberal-democratic societies. The liberal political philosophy of John Rawls has sometimes been charged with a normative tilt against full extension of the guarantees to these “private” relations. I find the opposite to be true. Given Rawls’s conception of the constitution as a society’s higher-legal framework for assurance of fairness in its basic structure, along with the justificatory function that Rawls assigns to the guarantees in a constitution thus conceived and the idea of these guarantees comprising a unified “scheme of liberties” guaranteed equally to all, it follows that norms of private law allowing constriction of basic of liberties of some by acts of others in civil society should be subject to review for proportional justification. But not every liberty-hostile exercise of a protected basic liberty will come under the scope of such review. For those that do not, liberalism must find some other response.

In Etica e ambiguità, Fabris dedicates some pages to the theme of nihilism and the dismay it entails: the fear that everything can be annihilated and that everything tends to be nothing in itself, and has neither consistency nor value. This paper first distinguishes a dramatic nihilism and a ‘ludic’ one and argues about the possible ethical fruitfulness of the nihilism’s dismay. Then it reflects on the anti-nihilist consequences of the perspective of creatio ex nihilo, that does not presuppose anything.

The political benefits of deliberation are increasingly cited, but not well understood. Neither are the processes involved in arriving at deliberative politics from pluralism and inclusion. This research reviews the available literature on political impacts related to deliberation following the empirical turn taken in deliberative democracy in recent years. The analysis of a specific case reveals that before deliberation the arguments presented gave rise to a deep fracture in the consensus. The deliberative process served to structure the consensus in pluralism helping citizens to formulate their own judgments. The findings suggest a renewed and complementary approach with the classical notion of deliberative democracy in the terms formulated by Jürgen Habermas in ecological and social terms in the line opened by various authors and assumed by Habermas himself in Between Facts and Norms. Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, 1992.

I address in the following pages the decisive question of "after Rawls", of the legacy of his work and (brutally said) of what will happen to the Rawlsian paradigm. I devote Section 2 to the moralism-realism opposition in political theory. I then discuss - in Section 3 - a complex trend in contemporary philosophy constituted by the postmodern climate and by what I call the new metaphysics. This trend tends, together with the political crisis of liberal-democracy, to make the traditional conception of normativity impossible. This is followed, in Section 4, by an argument that both philosophical-political approaches discussed here, the moralistic and the realist, ultimately need some conception of normativity. But, it is said in Section 5, in light of contemporary criticism, such a conception has to be different from the top-down conception of the past. The last Section 6 is finally devoted to some inconclusive conclusions about the future of political theory and the possibility of reformulating within it a conception of the normative bottom up.

In this work I move from a precise critical review of Adriano Fabris’ work Etica e ambiguità. Una filosofia della coerenza (Morcelliana, Brescia 2020), with special reference to the notion of ambiguity as he introduces and discusses it. I particularly concentrate on the definition of “philosophy” given in the work and the reconstruction of its fundamental difficulties. My aim is to show that in order to overcome such difficulties, an alternative picture of philosophy should be finally given, moving from a clear awareness of the fundamental misunderstanding from which its usual definition originates. I also give some hints as to the ethnocentric character of (Western modern) philosophy, also concealed in its pretension to universality.

In my discussion of Adriano Fabris’ Etica e ambiguità [Ethics and Ambiguity], I will consider three main objections. 1) Firstly, I will discuss Fabris’ attempt to criticize and reshape the Aristotelian ἔλεγχος, as it appears in the fourth book of Metaphysics, from a performative perspective, showing that it already falls within, and is substantially invalidated by, the semantic domain of Aristotle’s distinction between “contradiction” and “self-contradicting”. 2) Secondly, since Fabris invokes a reform of Western philosophy’s general attitude towards action and relation, I will show how classic ontology (notably Plato’s notions of being, as opposed to Parmenides’, and dialectics) already provides a robust example of a deeply relational (though admittedly not performative in the sense highlighted by Fabris) notion of being. 3) Thirdly, I criticize Fabris’ notion of relation, because it indifferently refers both to ontology and ethics, whereas a proper ethical consideration of it, while necessarily involving ontology, should be treated as distinct from the former.

Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics is an open access philosophical journal, being published only in an electronic format. The journal aims at promoting research and reflection, both historically and theoretically, in the fields of moral, political and legal philosophy, with no preclusion or adhesion to any cultural current or philosophical tradition. Contributions should be submitted in one of these languages: Italian, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish. The editorial staff especially welcomes interdisciplinary contributions with special attention to the main trends of the world of practice.

In this preface, we briefly explain A Theory of Justice’s importance for political philosophy, which is the reason that justifies this collection. Adjunctively, we sketch in very broad brushstrokes some of the components of this theory: the Kantian turn, the rehabilitation of contract theory and the defense of egalitarian liberalism. Finally, we describe the articles of this collection. We distinguish three axes: Rawls’s legacy, philosophical influences on Rawls, and specific problems regarding Rawls’s philosophy.

This paper aims at showing the consequences of Bruno Latour’s endorsement of the anti-holist, “flat” ontology (an ontology that denies that difference in scale is an ontological difference) shared by many speculative realists. While this assumption presents notorious problems on the political side, it will be shown to have explicative and pragmatic potential when it comes to political ecology. After exploring his treatment of the concept of scale, which draws on Gabriel Tarde’s monadological sociology, Latour’s radical democraticism, for which scale depends only on the number of connections and “alliances” an actor is able to put into existence, will be compared to Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects hypotheses, another ecology based on a peculiar treatment of the notion of scale, in order to show the advantages and the potential of Latour’s ecology of fragility. The aim of Latour’s politics is the composition of a common world, but this composition has no superior guarantor, and even Gaia, the holistic entity par excellence, cannot be brought into existence without an assembly of allies that Latour compares to a war declaration.

Suppose that the basic structures of two societies conform to Rawls’s principles of justice. One of these societies, however, includes—in addition to a just basic structure—an egalitarian ethos that further reduces inequalities that do not benefit the least advantaged. G. A. Cohen and others have argued that the second society is more just, thus rejecting any restriction of Rawls’s principles of justice to the basic structure. Andrew Williams has revived the basic structure restriction in the form of a publicity requirement. This paper highlights various problems with this attempt. In addition, it shows that an egalitarian ethos admits various plausible reformulations that could meet Williams’s publicity requirements. This only amounts to a partial victory for Cohen, however. In fact, the Rawlsian position could come out of this discussion strengthened, not because it can resist the egalitarian critique, but because it can incorporate its essence in the form of a set of more precise and specific public rules.

The paper critically addresses A Theory of Justice. It is first illustrated that Theory implies a paradigm shift at the time of its publication. This is followed by a critical analysis of central aspects of Theory, especially the reflexive equilibrium and the difference principle. The paper then reconstructs Rawlsian work. First by showing the continuities and discontinuities between Theory and Political Liberalism and by critically examining “overlapping consensus” and “public reason”. Subsequently, by examining A Law of Peoples and its idea of tolerance and the rejection of global distributive justice. Finally, the paper addresses Rawls's role as a public intellectual.

Limitarianism is a normative position that proposes the establishment of a maximum limit to the possession, use or enjoyment of valuable or scarce resources that a person can control. I am going to focus on the particular case of limiting wealth, since those who are very rich or extremely rich can have a highly negative influence on the life of democracy. This is the main reason to justify the limitation. I am going to defend a Rawlsian justification for limitarianism, which is based on the fact that wealth undermines the condition of the citizens being free and equal, and especially the fair value of political freedom. That is why in Theory of Justice it is stated that wealth can make a government look representative but only in appearance. This justification is also consistent with the antecedent of classical republicanism with which Rawls identifies himself, and with the measure of maximum wage.

This is a review of Joel Colon Ríos’ book “Constituent Power and the Law”. The review considers Colon Ríos’ book as the most important contribution so far examining the theory of constituent power, the doctrinal discussions around the subject, and the legal implications of the theory. The review examines some problems that are present in the book, related to (what it calls) the problem of “mediation” (who takes the place of “the people,” in actual practice?); the problem of “interpretation” (who interprets the “will of the people”, in actual practice?) and the problem of “historic abstinence” (which suggest exploring the theoretical discussion on the notion of constituent power in light of the political and social context where those discussions emerged).

In times of crisis it is necessary to revisit the theorization of radical change and the mechanisms through which it can be realized in a peaceful and orderly manner. Joel Colón-Ríos’s Constituent Power and the Law is a timely book that promotes our understanding of the concept of constituent power as well as of its juridical application. Despite its contributions, in this critical review I claim that, because the book is thought through an elitist democratic theory framework that presupposes the unitary nation-state, it excludes the republican theory tradition that is premised on the socio-ontological division between the powerful few and the many, and that conceives the periodic exercise of constituent power by the people as necessary to keep a republic uncorrupted. In addition, I take issue with Colón-Ríos’s interpretation of Rousseau as a supporter of the direct exercise of foundational constituent power by the people in (silent) primary assemblies, and the resulting reduction of the people’s exercise of constituent power to mere authorization and ratification—to the detriment of processes involving popular deliberative decisionmaking that lead to a mandate. Finally, I critically engage with his conceptualization of the ‘material constitution,’ arguing that the definition he applies is too broad to be useful. Including formal and substantive ordering rules and principles as part of the strictly material interpretation of the constitution, which emerges from power relations, conceals the specific contributions that the material framework brings to the study of constitutions and the law.

The paper examines three ideas present in Adriano Fabris' book: the link between the theoretical and practical dimensions of philosophy; the relation as a space of ambiguity; the question of the correlation between the idea of relation and the idea of substance.