Roberto Frega

In this article I examine the main conceptions of public reason in contemporary political philosophy in order to set the frame for appreciating the novelty of the pragmatist understanding of public reason as based upon the notion of consequences and upon a theory of rationality as inquiry. The approach is inspired by Dewey but is free from any concern with history of philosophy. The aim is to propose a different understanding of the nature of public reason aimed at overcoming the limitations of the existing approaches. Public reason is presented as the proper basis for discussing contested issues in the broad frame of deep democracy.

This paper tackles with the issue of the place of comprehensive beliefs within the public space. It tries to strike a middle path between the liberal ban on comprehensive beliefs and the anti-liberal claim that comprehensive beliefs should be given full pride of place in public deliberations. The article relies on arguments that are inspired by the pragmatist tradition. It starts locating the main cause of failures at articulating comprehensive beliefs and public reason in a central feature of liberal epistemology, namely the way it conceives public reason via a preliminary distinction between public and non public beliefs. After criticizing this distinction, the article introduces a distinction between the normative practice of justification and the normative practice of adjudication as a more perspicuous way to establish the place that comprehensive beliefs should play within political forums. It then concludes showing that this approach provides a satisfying answer to the issue of the public role of comprehensive beliefs in a liberal democratic regime that is respectful of citizens’ thick identities while at the same time complying with the requirements of respect set by the liberal tradition. Keywords: public reason and religion - pragmatism - liberalism - communitarianism - normative practices

In this paper I offer a first account of a practice-based conception of normativity for the political domain. This standpoint is used to relocate the most sophisticated normative practices of justification and critique within an experience-based framework, that of the human being as a “normative creature.” I begin by discussing the two major paradigms in political theory, showing that their neglect of this broad framework of normativity is a serious drawback. I then proceed to articulate the central elements of a practicebased account of normativity: the notions of normative practices and normative orders, and an account of the rationality potential of normativity as practice.

This article defends a pragmatic conception of objectivity for the moral domain. I begin by contextualizing pragmatic approaches to objectivity and discuss at some length one of the most interesting proposals in this area, Cheryl Misak's conception of pragmatic objectivity. My general argument is that in order to defend a pragmatic approach to objectivity, the pragmatic stance should be interpreted in more radical terms than most contemporary proposals do. I suggest in particular that we should disentangle objectivity from truth, and I claim that moral inquiry is in most cases responsive to a normative standard that is closer to warranted assertibility than to truth. Using an argument that relies partly on Huw Price's account of forms of normative assertion, I will show that a practice-based account of warranted assertibility does the epistemic work required to defend objectivity while avoiding exposure to the criticisms that are usually addressed against this notion

In this paper I argue against Jürgen Habermas’s theoretical dualism between ethics and morality. I do this by showing how his account of normativity is vitiated by an unnecessary superposition of a social-evolutionary and a theoretical-linguistic account of normativity, and that this brings about theoretical problems that in the end cannot be overcome. I also show that Rainer Forst’s attempt at salvaging Habermas’s distinction is equally doomed to failure, but that his attempt nevertheless invites new and more fruitful avenues for normative theory that are worth exploring. The conclusion of this paper is that traditional notions of ethics and morality can be preserved provided we heavily redefine their meanings and release them from some of the theoretical work they have been expected to accomplish, but that to complete this transition we also need to supersede Forst’s pluralization of normative contexts toward a theory of normative practices that in the end makes the distinction between ethics and morality workable but useless. I begin by first locating the debate about ethics and morality within the context of recent normative theory, and proceed to examine the two main strategies through which Habermas has elaborated his idea of a sharp dualism between ethics and morality. I then introduce a theoretical distinction between what I call a horizontal and a vertical integration of ethics and morality and contend that whilst only the horizontal is viable, Habermas decidedly prefers the idea of a vertical integration. With this work done, I proceed to complete my critique of Habermas’s argument and show how, by recovering the pragmatist roots of his thought, an alternative solution based on a functionalist understanding of morality could be envisaged. I then conclude by examining Rainer Forst’s attempt at salvaging Habermas’s account, and show that the failure of Forst’s attempts opens the way for new and more fruitful approaches to normative theory which are more likely to recover the pragmatist roots of Habermas’s thought.

This article critically examines two central concepts in normative theory—ethical life and morality—by comparing the pragmatist approach with that of Critical Theory. This is done by way of a close scrutiny of Axel Honneth’s reading of the pragmatist philosophers John Dewey and George H. Mead. This focus on Honneth’s use of pragmatism serves as a port of entry to provide a comparative analysis of pragmatism and Critical Theory’s approaches to normativity. As I intend to show, Honneth’s troubles with making sense of the pragmatist approach to normativity are a litmus test of some persistent ambiguities at the heart of his understanding of normativity. I set the stage by reconstructing Honneth’s reading of Dewey and Mead. That will provide the background against which to set up a comparison between the pragmatist conception of normativity and that of Critical Theory, with a view to assessing their relative validity. I then relate Honneth’s reading of the pragmatists to his own philosophical project and to the important place occupied in it by the same dualism of ethical life and morality.

This paper aims to develop a new understanding of normativity based upon the priority of the ordinary. By relying upon diverse sociological and philosophical traditions, the paper seeks to emphasize the ordinary tacit assumptions which provide the basic structure of our experience of the world and its normative features. The general argument is that, whereas sociological traditions of social interactionism shed new light upon the “empirical fact of normativity”, ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism offer a theoretical account of normativity which is consistent with the picture of normativity which emerges out of these empirical descriptions. The paper synthesizes the main achievements of these traditions into a unified account of normativity.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I first lay out a definition of perfectionism drawing mainly upon the works of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell. Secondly, I introduce the notion of “expressive rationality” and show how it contributes to expanding the scope of pragmatism beyond its original boundaries. I then proceed to examine pragmatism and perfectionism as competing alternative accounts of moral experience, through a discussion of Coetzee’s novel The Lives of Animals. In so doing, I intend to show that pragmatism and perfectionism constitute two necessary and irreducible approaches to moral experience, pointing towards two diverging and yet irreducibly joined spheres of moral life. RÉSUMÉ : Cet article commence par proposer une définition du perfectionnisme inspirée en grande partie des travaux de Cora Diamond et Stanley Cavell. J’introduis ensuite l’idée de «rationalité expressive» et je montre comment elle contribue à étendre la portée du pragmatisme au-delà de ses frontières originales. Je fais enfin l’examen du pragmatisme et du perfectionnisme comme offrant des explications concurrentes de l’expérience morale en m’appuyant sur une discussion du roman The Lives of Animals de Coetzee. J’entends ainsi montrer que perfectionnisme et pragmatisme, loin de proposer deux philosophies éthiques irréconciliables, expriment deux exigences en même temps distinctes et irréductibles de la pensée éthique

Since Rawl’s A theory of justice, political philosophy has been haunted by the moral and epistemic problem of justification. The growing awareness of the irreducibility of human disagreement has increased a sense of uneasiness towards the ambivalence of pluralism that, in turn, has fostered the hope that rationality, in its public use, could help us in grounding the social order on more stable basis. Although Stanley Cavell is not usually considered a significant participant in this debate, through his work he has developed an original and strong interpretation of the nature of justification and rationality. Cavell’s search for a new conception of rationality starts from an analysis of the rationality immanent to the use of ordinary language. This model of explanation, whose origins are to be found in the teaching of Wittgenstein and Austin, is then extended and articulated through an analysis of aesthetic judgment. This vantage point is successively used by Cavell in order to redefine the epistemological categories of political and moral philosophy. Cavell’s moral and political philosophy is based on an original account of practical rationality and justification built over the concepts of claim, articulation and expression. As Cavell himself has never offered a complete account of his theory of rationality, in this paper I provide a wide reconstruction of the linguistic, aesthetic and moral steps through which this theory has been developed

This article explores the theme of moral rationality by examining two distinct philosophical approaches, those of perfectionism and pragmatism broadly construed. It does this by comparing Cora Diamond's reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel The Lives of Animals with an imaginary reading of the same novel tuned to a moral sensibility closer to Deweyan pragmatism. By comparing a real account with an imaginary one, the article intends to press Diamond's perfectionist understanding of problematic moral experience into confrontation with a pragmatist account of the same phenomenon. This reading becomes the starting point for a broader confrontation between two larger philosophical conceptions: perfectionism and pragmatism. By this comparison, the article means to extend a dialogue begun more than a century ago, showing in particular that integrating both perspectives within a common moral epistemology provides new insights into our understanding of moral experience. The general claim is that their differences notwithstanding, perfectionism and pragmatism share a common moral sensibility, although they part ways on some decisive issues that the article makes explicit

This paper aims at renovating the prospects for social philosophy through a confrontation between pragmatism and critical theory. In particular, it contends that the resources of pragmatism for advancing a project of emancipatory social philosophy have so far been neglected. After contrasting the two major traditions in social philosophy—the analytical and the critical—I proceed to outline the main traits of a pragmatist social philosophy. By inscribing pragmatism within the tradition of social philosophy, my aim is to promote a new understanding of pragmatism as one of the central Euro-American traditions in social and political philosophy, deserving to be on an equal footing with critical theory and political liberalism. And, furthermore, one whose critical and radical force may be of great help in the wake of the dismissal of the metaphysical certainties upon which the critical program of social philosophy had once set its hopes of social emancipation