Cristina Lafont

In a recent article Allan Buchanan and Robert Keohane defend the view that one of the necessary conditions for the legitimacy of global governance institutions such as the WTO and the IMF is that they respect basic human rights. I certainly agree that setting the minimal threshold of moral acceptability any lower would be entirely unreasonable. But, unfortunately, the view that global governance institutions have human rights obligations is far from uncontroversial. These institutions themselves go to great lengths to deny such a claim. Their official stance finds strong normative support in the state-centric conception of human rights that dominates both normative debates about human rights and current human rights practice. In this article I challenge some of the normative assumptions behind the state-centric conception in order to defend a pluralist conception that ascribes human rights obligations not only to states but also to non-state actors such as global governance institutions. After briefly analyzing some of the proposals currently under discussion about how to legally entrench the obligation to respect human rights in those institutions, I will defend the feasibility of those proposals against the objection that their implementation is incompatible with the current state-system and thus it would require the creation of a world state.

Este artículo analiza el impacto del giro lingüístico en la transformación de la concepción kantiana de los juicios sintéticos a priori. Se centra para ello en dos concepciones contemporáneas de los mismos, a saber, el a priori hermenéutico de Heidegger y el a priori contextual de Putnam, y saca a relucir expresamente tanto sus rasgos similares como sus importantes diferencias: mientras que la concepción heideggeriana mantiene el idealismo transcendental de Kant a través de la suposición hermenéutica de que el significado determina la referencia, la concepción de Putnam rompe por completo con la teoría kantiana de los juicios sintéticos a priori, según la cual éstos no pueden ser modificados por la sola experiencia, al tiempo que rechaza la suposición kantiana de que los juicios sintéticos a priori y aposteriori son dos clases permanentes de juicios. En contraste con Heidegger, Putnam es por eso capaz de mostrar que los juicios sintéticos apriori son modificables bajo condiciones especiales.

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.

InA Theory of Justice, Rawls claims that “to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.” Although it may indeed seem intuitively plausible that a principle based on “threat advantage” cannot count as a principle of justice, it is an altogether different matter to explain why this is so. The question is especially pressing if one bears in mind that such a principle of bargaining in fact underlies many institutionally regulated interactions. Moreover, to the extent that morality is thought of as a mechanism for guaranteeing mutual advantage in the resolution of conflicts, it may indeed seem necessary that it reflect the bargaining power of the parties (in order to make sure that it is indeed advantageous for all of them). In fact, there is a prominent tradition of social-contract theories (from Hobbes to Gauthier) that work under this assumption and claim to provide an answer to what justice requires as much as Rawls's theory does. So seen, the burden of proof seems to fall rather on the shoulders of those committed to claim both that morality is a mechanism that works to the advantage of all and that it nevertheless requires neutralizing all differences in bargaining power.

The main thesis of this article consists in that the two concepts “reference” and “truth” have an ultimate realist sense of which all epistemologizing conceptions -like relativism and incommensurabilist theses- necessarily have to come short. The arguments for this thesis are embedded in a revision of the ‘direct’-reference-position as well as of recent arguments against epistemic notions of truth, to show in the next,evaluating step how it is exactly the realist kernel of both concepts that makes arguments as to the corrective function of both notions within epistemic practices possible. This nucleus of both notions, necessary for every intent to explain learning from experience, consists in the supposition of an objective world to which all speakers refer using the same concepts and which is represented by their statements. This supposition does not inevitably have to be interpreted as a metaphysical postulate of a world in itself, but can be seen, the author argues, as a necessary formal presupposition ofcommunication, which is mastered by the speakers themselves through their having learned to use desigantive expressions referentially as well as to use the true/false distinction in its normative bipolarity.

In this paper I analyze the tension between realism and antirealism at the basis of Kantian constructivism. This tension generates a conflictive account of the source of the validity of social norms. On the one hand, the claim to moral objectivity characteristic of Kantian moral theories makes the validity of norms depend on realist assumptions concerning the existence of shared fundamental interests among all rational human beings. I illustrate this claim through a comparison of the approaches of Rawls, Habermas and Scanlon. On the other hand, however, objections to moral realism motivate many Kantian constructivists to endorse the antirealist claim that reasonable agreement is the source of the validity of social norms. After analyzing the difficulties in the latter strategy, I try to show how a balance between the realist and antirealist elements of Kantian constructivism can be reached by drawing a sharper distinction between the justice and the legitimacy of social norms.

This essay focuses on recent proposals to confer decisional status upon deliberative minipublics such as citizen juries, Deliberative Polls, citizen’s assemblies, and so forth. Against such proposals, I argue that inserting deliberative minipublics into political decision-making processes would diminish the democratic legitimacy of the political system as a whole. This negative conclusion invites a question: which political uses of minipublics would yield genuinely democratic improvements? Drawing from a participatory conception of deliberative democracy, I propose several uses of minipublics that could enhance the democratic legitimacy of political decision-making in current societies.

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

Any attempt to elucidate the interconnections between phenomenology and critical theory must at some point confront the question of what role Heidegger's philosophy plays in that equation. The historical or biographical side of the question is interesting in its own right and can be philosophically illuminating.1 My focus here, however, will be systematic. In particular, I would like to analyze the similarities and differences between Heidegger's hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology in Being and Time and Habermas's transformation of critical theory in his Theory of Communicative Action. As a way of narrowing my focus, I will take as a guide the..

The main thesis of this article consists in that the two concepts “reference” and “truth” have an ultimate realist sense of which all epistemologizing conceptions -like relativism and incommensurabilist theses- necessarily have to come short. The arguments for this thesis are embedded in a revision of the ‘direct’-reference-position as well as of recent arguments against epistemic notions of truth, to show in the next,evaluating step how it is exactly the realist kernel of both concepts that makes arguments as to the corrective function of both notions within epistemic practices possible. This nucleus of both notions, necessary for every intent to explain learning from experience, consists in the supposition of an objective world to which all speakers refer using the same concepts and which is represented by their statements. This supposition does not inevitably have to be interpreted as a metaphysical postulate of a world in itself, but can be seen, the author argues, as a necessary formal presupposition ofcommunication, which is mastered by the speakers themselves through their having learned to use desigantive expressions referentially as well as to use the true/false distinction in its normative bipolarity

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.

The main argument of this article is that the concept of truth is as much internally linked to the concept of knowledge as to the concept of reality. As a consequence it is affirmed that all attempts to explain its structure which are either exclusively biased in an epistemic point of view or in a purely realist metaphysics are bound to fail. Instead this article proposes the adoption of a pragmatic standpoint which would permit to reconstruct the fallibilistic role displayed by the concept of truth in the epistemic practices of belief-revision, which must in turn be reconstructed precisely taking in account the connection of truth and reality. In that way both intuitions as to the concept of truth, the epistemic and the realist one, can be reconciled. Moreover this strategy provides as such, if correct, a strong argument in favor of an essential function of the concept of truth against contemporary deflationist tendencies

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