Cristina Lafont

In this essay, I analyze the cosmopolitan project for a new international order that Habermas has articulated in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the project oscillates between two models. The first is a very ambitious model for a future international order geared to fulfill the peace and human rights goals of the UN Charter. The second is a minimalist model, in which the obligation to protect human rights by the international community is circumscribed to the negative duty of preventing wars of aggression and massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. According to this model, any more ambitious goals should be left to a global domestic politics, which would have to come about through negotiated compromises among domesticated major powers at the transnational level. I defend the ambitious model by arguing that there is no basis for drawing a normatively significant distinction between massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts and those due to regulations of the global economic order. I conclude that the cosmopolitan goals of the Habermasian project can only be achieved if the principles of transnational justice recognized by the international community are ambitious enough to cover economic justice.

En este ensayo analizo algunas dificultades conceptuales asociadas a la exigencia de que las instituciones globales adquieran un grado mayor de legitimidad democrática. En ausencia de un Estado mundial, puede parecer inconsistente exigir que las instituciones globales sean responsables ante todos los que han de acatar sus decisiones y al mismo tiempo insistir en que los miembros de dichas instituciones, en tanto que representantes de sus respectivos Estados, mantengan las responsabilidades especiales que tienen con los ciudadanos de sus propios países. Esta dificultad parece insuperable a la luz de la extendida aceptación de la concepción de los derechos humanos centrada en el Estado, según la cual los Estados, y sólo ellos, son los responsables principales de proteger los derechos de sus ciudadanos. Contra esta concepción, defiendo la plausibilidad de una concepción alternativa, pluralista de las obligaciones derivadas de los derechos humanos. Para ello argumento que, si se tiene en cuenta la distinción tripartita entre la obligación de respetar, proteger y realizar los derechos humanos, no hay ninguna dificultad conceptual en exigir que tanto los Estados como los actores no estatales se responsabilicen por sus respectivas obligaciones en materia de derechos humanos.

In this paper I focus on the discussion between Rawls and Habermas on procedural justice. I use Rawls’s distinction between pure, perfect, and imperfect procedural justice to distinguish three possible readings of discourse ethics. Then I argue, against Habermas’s own recent claims, that only an interpretation of discourse ethics as imperfect procedural justice can make compatible its professed cognitivism with its proceduralism. Thus discourse ethics cannot be understood as a purely procedural account of the notion of justice. Finally I draw the different consequences that follow from this reading.

The normative place of religion in liberal democracies is as contested as ever. This contestation produces understandable fears that liberal democratic institutions may ultimately be incompatible with religious forms of life. If this is so, if there is genuinely no hope that secular and religious citizens can equally take ownership over and identify with these institutions, then the future of democracy within pluralist societies seems seriously threatened. These fears commonly arise in debates concerning the liberal criterion of democratic legitimacy, according to which citizens ought to justify the imposition of coercive policies on each other with reasons that everyone can reasonably accept. Since religious reasons are not generally acceptable to secular citizens and citizens of different faiths, endorsing this criterion entails accepting the claim that, for the purposes of political justification, public reasons should take priority over religious considerations. This claim has been vigorously criticized on two grounds. First, critics resist such a claim on the skeptical grounds that there is simply no such thing as public reasons, that is, a subset of reasons that all citizens can reasonably accept as having priority for justifying coercive policies. Second, critics contest the claim on the normative grounds that an unequal treatment of religious reasons for the purposes of political justification is unfair to religious citizens and is therefore incompatible with the core values of a liberal democracy. Against both lines of criticism, I articulate a defense of the priority of public reasons that is exclusively based on the normative commitments constitutive of liberal democratic institutions and which can therefore be reflectively endorsed by all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular.

In this article I analyze Rawls' and Habermas' accounts of the role of religion in political deliberations in the public sphere. After pointing at some difficulties involved in the unequal distribution of deliberative rights and duties among religious and secular citizens that follow from their proposals, I argue for a way to structure political deliberation in the public sphere that imposes the same deliberative obligations on all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular. These obligations derive from the ideal of mutual accountability that is supposed to guide political deliberation in a deliberative democracy. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply

In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom engages Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of interpretation in order to show that his inferentialist approach to understanding conceptual content can explain and underwrite the main theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics which he calls “the gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes”. In order to assess whether this claim is sound, I analyze the three types of philosophical interpretations that Brandom discusses: de re, de dicto and de traditione, and argue that they commit him to an “ecumenical historicism” that is directly at odds with the hermeneutic approach. Although the variety of de re interpretation that Brandom denominates de traditione comes indeed very close to the Gadamerian approach, I conclude that if Brandomian scorekeepers were to adopt it, they could become Gadamerian hermeneuts, but once they did, they would not be able to go back to their scorekeeping practices as described by Brandom

In his Democracy across borders, Bohman articulates an ambitious political proposal for a future international order. Perhaps its most salient feature is the promise of global democracy without a world government. Global democracy is usually associated with the ideal of a world community unified under a set of global democratic institutions. Fear of the totalitarian consequences that such a concentration of power would generate often leads even the staunchest cosmopolitans to limit their democratic aspirations to the national level and merely hope for the progressive implementation of the rule of law at the global level. In his book, Bohman tries to break with the widespread assumption that an increase in democratization across national borders must be purchased at the price of a concentration of power that dangerously increases the potential for political domination. According to Bohman, this assumption is rooted in a narrow understanding of the democratic ideal - an understanding that needs to be replaced by a more complex one. (Published: 5 February 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pp. 13-19. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i1.4850.

En la discusión contemporánea sobre modelos normativos para un nuevo orden internacional está ampliamente aceptado que la justicia internacional requiere garantizar la paz, la seguridad y la defensa de los derechos humanos. Sin embargo, así́ como los objetivos de paz y seguridad son incontrovertibles, no puede decirse lo mismo del objetivo de protección de los derechos humanos. Los habituales candidatos al desacuerdo son los llamados derechos económicos y sociales, seguidos por los derechos políticos a la participación democrática. Pero, desgraciadamente, ni siquiera el derecho a la igualdad plena es incuestionado. Algunos autores optan por la estrategia minimalista de identificar derechos humanos básicos, con la esperanza de suscitar aprobación universal en el seno de la comunidad internacional, mientras que otros siguen una estrategia más generosa, con la intención de incrementar las consecuencias normativas de sus propuestas. [Fragmento]

To address the question posed in the title, I focus on Heidegger's conception of linguistic communication developed in the sections on Rede and Gerede of Being and Time. On the basis of a detailed analysis of these sections I argue that Heidegger was a social externalist but semantic internalist. To make this claim, however, I first need to clarify some key points that have led critics to assume Heidegger's commitment to social externalism automatically commits him to semantic externalism regarding concept use. I begin by explaining the independence of those positions, arguing that social externalism answers the question of whose concepts in a linguistic community are properly individuated, whereas semantic externalism makes a claim about what it takes for concepts to be properly individuated. Once these issues are distinguished, it is possible to see that Heidegger's intersubjectivist conception of language commits him to social externalism, while his conception of the ontological difference commits him to semantic internalism.

Bekanntester deutscher Philosoph der Gegenwart. Seit mehr als fünfzig Jahren prägt Jürgen Habermas das intellektuelle Leben Deutschlands und darüber hinaus. Mit seinem Werk nimmt er entscheidenden Einfluss auf die Wissenschaften, auf Politik und aktuelle gesellschaftliche Diskussionen. Neben einem Überblick zur Biografie stellt das Handbuch Habermas intellektuelle Kontexte, wie z. B. die Frankfurter Schule, vor und beleuchtet die wichtigsten Stationen seines komplexen Werkes. Der Schlussteil informiert über Begriffe und Konzepte, die sich durch das gesamte Werk ziehen.

This paper is an attempt to criticize the reification of language present in Heidegger’s writings after the Kehre . The steps of the argument are as follows. First, it is argued that the specific features of Heidegger’s conception of language after the Kehre can be traced back to Heidegger’s conception of the ontological difference in Being and Time . The common element in both conceptions is the assumption that meaning determines reference (i.e. that the way entities are understood determines which entities we can refer to). In the next step the implications of this assumption are shown through an analysis of Heidegger’s conception of designation in Being and Time and after the Kehre . Finally, this conception of designation is criticized with the help of the analysis of designation offered by the so-called theories of direct reference. Key Words: Donnellan • Heidegger • language • linguistic idealism • meaning • ontological difference • reference • referential/attributive distinction.

En este artículo se intenta mostrar cómo es posible defender un punto de vista universalista y cognítivista en cuestiones morales sin tener que negar el pluralismo ético que caracteriza a las sociedades modernas. Para ello se analiza una dificultad que ha sido planteada recientemente a la ética del discurso de Habermas en relación con la posibilidad de compaginar ambas cosas. Si defender un universalismo moral implica defender lo que Habermas denomina "la premisa de una respuesta correcta» en relación con las cuestiones morales, tal universalismo tiene que suponer, pues, que sólo puede haber una interpretación correcta de dichas cuestiones; si esto es así, el universalismo moral, en realidad, excluye el pluralismo como alternativa racional al acuerdo en cuestiones prácticas. Dicha dificultad puede evitarse, sin embargo, si se muestra que «la premisa de una respuesta correcta» no implica, en realidad, «la premisa de una única interpretación correcta»

En este artículo se argumenta contra la interpretación metaética del kantianismo moral como una forma de constructivismo o antirealismo moral. Dado que los kantianos no comparten el expresivismo característico del antirealismo moral estándar, el constructivismo kantiano parece llevar a una posición inherentemente inestable que sólo puede desarrollarse o bien en un realismo consistente con el cognitivismo moral kantiano o en un decidido antirealismo moral. Tomando la ética del discurso de Habermas como ejemplo, aquí se contrasta una interpretación realista con una interpretación antirealista del principio moral de universalización con la intención de mostrar que sólo la primera es compatible con el cognitivismo moral característico de las éticas kantianas, mientras que la segunda lleva inevitablemente a un planteamiento decisionista y, con ello, a un claro relativismo moral.