Pablo Gilabert

In this article, I will reflect on Lea Ypi’s methodological contribution in her wonderful book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency. Ypi addresses the important and underexplored issue of the relation between normative principles and political agency. She proposes a ‘dialectical approach’ to normative political theory, which she contrasts with ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ approaches, arguing that the first does a better job in articulating progressive guidelines for political agents seeking to achieve justice. Ypi presents a general framework that applies, but is not restricted to, global justice. In what follows, I first reconstruct what I take to be Ypi’s key conceptual and substantive moves and then raise some critical observations and questions. The central polemical contentions are that Ypi’s arguments do not succeed at defeating the importance of ideal theory for activist political theory and practice, and that we need an account of normative political reasoning that articulates more explicitly the relation between considerations of moral desirability and political feasibility

In what follows I will consider Kant's and Habermas's conceptions of moral validity in a comparative and critical way. First, I will reconstruct Habermas's discursive or deliberative reformulation of Kant's moral theory. And, second, I will introduce some comparative critical considerations. I will contend that, though much is gained with Habermas's intersubjectivist reformulation of Kant's moral philosophy, some problems emerge that could be treated with the help of certain Kantian insights. I will focus on Kant's and Habermas's strictly moral writings. The issue of political validity or legitimacy is of course of great importance, but I will not address it here.

This paper presents a substantivist construal of discourse ethics, which claims that we should see our engagement in public deliberation as expressing and elaborating a substantive commitment to basic moral ideas of solidarity, equality, and freedom. This view is different from Habermas's standard formalist defence of discourse ethics, which attempts to derive the principle of discursive moral justification from primarily non-moral presuppositions of rational argumentation as such. After explicating the difference between the substantivist and the formalist construal, I defend the former by showing that it is not only intuitively compelling, but also particularly well equipped for addressing four important objections recently levelled against discourse ethics and its political applications. I conclude by pointing out some consequences of the previous discussion for the future of Critical Theory

To be justifiable, the demands of a conception of human rights and global justice must be such that (a) they focus on the protection of important human interests, and (b) their fulfilment is feasible. I discuss the feasibility condition. I present a general account of the relation between moral desirability, feasibility and obligation within a conception of justice. I analyse feasibility, a complex idea including different types, domains and degrees. It is possible to respond in various ways if the fulfilment of basic socioeconomic human rights against severe poverty seems at first to be infeasible.

Pablo Gilabert,Aude Bandini | : Cet article s’intéresse au lien entre deux perspectives qui concernent la nature des droits humains. Selon la perspective « politique » ou « pratique », les droits humains sont des revendications que les individus entretiennent face à un certain nombre de structures institutionnelles, dans certains États modernes, en vertu des intérêts qui sont les leurs selon les contextes qui les mettent en jeu. Selon la perspective « humaniste » ou « naturaliste », plus traditionnelle, les droits humains sont des revendications pré-institutionnelles que les individus entretiennent face à tous les autres individus, en vertu d’intérêts propres à l’humanité qu’ils ont tous en partage. Cet article soutient qu’une fois qu’on identifie ces deux perspectives sous leur meilleur jour, on peut voir qu’elles sont complémentaires et qu’on a en réalité besoin de chacune d’elles pour donner sens, sur le plan normatif, à la pratique contemporaine des droits humains. J’y explique comment des considérations humanistes et politiques peuvent et même doivent travailler main dans la main si on veut rendre compte du concept, du contenu et de la justification des droits humains. | : This essay explores the relation between two perspectives on the nature of human rights. According to the « political » or « practical » perspective, human rights are claims that individuals have against certain institutional structures, in particular modern states, in virtue of interests they have in contexts that include them. According to the more traditional « humanist » or « naturalistic » perspective, human rights are pre-institutional claims that individuals have against all other individuals in virtue of interests characteristic of their com mon humanity. This essay argues that once we identify the two perspectives in their best light, we can see that they are complementary and that in fact we need both to make good normative sense of the contemporary practice of human rights. It explains how humanist and political considerations can and should work in tandem to account for the concept, content, and justification of human rights.