Andre Santos Campos

This paper develops a future-oriented and person-centred normative argument based on expectancies that is immune to most of the problems identified in the rights of future persons. The argument unfolds in four parts. The first draws on the notion of expectancies present in inheritance law and maintains that it is possible to formulate a rule of prospective beneficiaries that correlates with entitlements and legitimate claims without necessarily acquiring the status of rights. The second extends expectancies to future persons and concludes that the latter can be considered present holders of such currently binding entitlements. The third section raises the question of whether democracies are bound to a principle of fidelity towards expectancies in such a way that outweighs current people’s rights in cases of conflicts. The response does not prove particularly future-beneficial in such cases. However, section four clarifies why expectancies still carry a crucial moral weight in democracies, one that is not sufficiently established by depersonalised forms of future-oriented ethics.

In this article, we shed light on the debate about the financial performance of socially responsible investment (SRI) mutual funds by separately analyzing the contributions of before-fee performance and fees to SRI funds' performance, and by investigating the role played by fund management companies in the determination of those variables. We apply the matching estimator methodology to obtain our results and find that in the period 1997–2005, US SRI funds had better beforeand after-fee performance than conventional funds with similar characteristics. The differences, however, are driven exclusively by SRI funds run by management companies specialized in SRI. While these funds significantly outperform similar conventional funds, funds run by companies not specialized in SRI underperform their matched conventional funds. We find no significant differences in fees between SRI and conventional funds except in one case: SRI funds are cheaper than conventional funds run by the same management company

A recent trend in futures studies has called for strengthening the inclusion of future generations in constitutional law. This is problematic from a practical and a normative viewpoint. This paper introduces a future-oriented theory of democratic constitutionalism that overcomes originalism (which privileges the past) and living constitutionalism (which privileges the present) without resorting to the explicit constitutional protection of the yet unborn. It is divided into five sections. The first challenges the notion that the constitutional entrenchment of the non-overlapping future is the best means of implementing long time horizons in democratic legal systems. The second maintains that constitutions are substantive normative expressions of the ultimate justification of authority. The third demonstrates that the substantive dimension of constitutions is cross-temporal and includes what I call ‘the objective interests in the future’ of all members of the people. The fourth connects such objective interests with rights to political participation. The final section focuses on the cross-temporal role of constitutional adjudication. Because rights to political participation include objective interests in the future and necessarily hold the status of constitutional rights in any legitimate democratic constitution, constitutional adjudication must guarantee their enforcement over government action.

Modern political philosophy, especially since Machiavelli, intends to uncover what politics actually is, and in order to achieve this it often needs to penetrate into disciplines not immediately related to politics and assimilate for itself additional concepts and methodologies. Thus, it appears to be interdisciplinary in the manipulation of specific conceptual instruments. Since there is a methodological shift in modernity imposing the individual person as a basic starting-point of political philosophy, which is expressed in a language of rights, the birth of this juridical-political interdisciplinarity is to be found in a table of concepts established in the science of law and applicable to political philosophy. In order to further understand this, the origins of Grotius’s definitions of ius must be sought out, since they set the background for the bridge he architected between law and political philosophy to be crossed by subsequent modern political philosophers. The solidity of this theoretical basis for interdisciplinary political philosophy depends upon the simultaneity of all of Grotius’s different meanings of ius: it is from this foundation that seventeenth-century political philosophy can begin from.

In representative democracies, the absence of responsiveness by elected officials to the interests of the represented often generates problems of legitimacy, accountability and effectiveness. However, responsiveness also tends to narrow the time horizons of democratic decision-making and promote short-termism. This paper advances the notion that responsiveness to interests involving distant time horizons is possible by reconfiguring the franchise in a time-sensitive and future-oriented way. It is divided into two parts. The first pinpoints a few inconsistencies in the available proposals for making responsiveness and the long term compatible (e.g., promoting youth turnout, narrowing the franchise to robust epistemic fitness, establishing future-oriented institutions). The second advances the creation of temporal electoral circles operating alongside territorial electoral circles in order to prompt responsiveness to multitemporal interests. The conclusion asserts that this kind of franchise design is the best available option for introducing temporal aspects into the character of democratic representation.

The political conception makes sense of human rights strictly in light of their role in international human rights practice, more specifically by describing how they justify interventions against states that engage in or fail to prevent human rights violations. This conception is, therefore, normative and fact-dependent. Beyond this, it does not seem to have much to say about the actual nature of international human rights practice. The argument sustained here reinterprets the political conception by resorting to a heuristic device that explains how normativity can be fact-dependent: the Hartian model. The characteristics of H.L.A. Hart’s rule of recognition are useful to determine the characteristics of human rights practice from the viewpoint of the political conception. Also, they help to overcome some of the problems typically faced by the political conception, such as whether there is only one practice or many, whether the notion of human rights becomes too contingent on the way the world is currently organised, how agents can violate content-changing practices, or how reliance on current states of affairs leaves room for criticism of those states of affairs.

Machiavelli is known chiefly for The Prince, but his main considerations on politics are in his most profound and later work Discourses on Livy, the complexity, length and style of which have often discouraged new readers and interpreters of Machiavelli, despite its historical and theoretical importance. For this reason, the Discourses has not been given the attention it deserves. This volume of newly commissioned essays by some of the world's leading experts on Machiavelli overcomes this gap. It is the first collective volume dedicated specifically to this work, ranging over topics such as Machiavelli's republicanism, the relation between liberty and tyranny, the role of religion, his conception of history, his writing style, his view of society as a plural and conflictive body, his suggestion of how a free state should be organized, or his notions of the people and virtù. Contributors include: Jérémie Barthas, Thomas Berns, Alessandro Campi, J. Patrick Coby, Marie Gaille, Marco Geuna, Mark Jurdjevic, Cary J. Nederman, Gabriele Pedullà, Diogo Pires Aurélio, Fabio Raimondi, Andre Santos Campos, Miguel Vatter, and Camila Vergara.

This paper adopts justificatory moral pluralism – a multilevel framework for justifying the choice by different agents of the most appropriate norms and values to guide their decisions and actions – to climate change. Its main objective is to investigate how ethics may effectively help achieve a better result in deciding how to mitigate, adapt, or compensate by enhancing the moral acceptability of the available policies or actions that are most likely to counter the effects of climate change. JMP presents agents – individuals, nonstate, and state – with a thorough yet flexible process of matching policies and actions with ethical theories, raising the robustness of moral reasons for politically efficient and individually motivating courses of action against climate change. JMP triggers climate responsibility and sensibility in agents, engaging them in discussing and finding out individually and collectively the most acceptable paths for the decarbonisation transition that is fast approaching.

Epistemic impairment has been the decisive yardstick when excluding infants from political agency. One of the suggestions to bypass the epistemic requirement of political agency and to encourage the inclusion of infants in representative democracies is to resort to proxies or surrogates who share or advocate interests which may be coincidental with their interests. However, this solution is far from desirable, given that it privileges the political agency of parents, guardians and trustees over other adult citizens. This article offers an alternative to this conceptual frame of reference by making a case for the political agency of infants. Firstly, it maintains that political agency can be understood in terms of the several facets involved in political representation. Secondly, it claims that the all-affected principle can be reformulated as an ‘infant-affected-interests principle’ in light of which infants are members of the class of the represented. Thirdly, it explores the ways through which this political agency can occur without having to resort to alternative conceptions of representation. The conclusion ascertains that infant enfranchisement is highly undesirable and that there are more viable forms to promote infant political agency, such as virtual representation, infant-beneficial principles of political action and ombudspersons for infants.

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 368-389, April 2022. Epistemic impairment has been the decisive yardstick when excluding infants from political agency. One of the suggestions to bypass the epistemic requirement of political agency and to encourage the inclusion of infants in representative democracies is to resort to proxies or surrogates who share or advocate interests which may be coincidental with their interests. However, this solution is far from desirable, given that it privileges the political agency of parents, guardians and trustees over other adult citizens. This article offers an alternative to this conceptual frame of reference by making a case for the political agency of infants. Firstly, it maintains that political agency can be understood in terms of the several facets involved in political representation. Secondly, it claims that the all-affected principle can be reformulated as an ‘infant-affected-interests principle’ in light of which infants are members of the class of the represented. Thirdly, it explores the ways through which this political agency can occur without having to resort to alternative conceptions of representation. The conclusion ascertains that infant enfranchisement is highly undesirable and that there are more viable forms to promote infant political agency, such as virtual representation, infant-beneficial principles of political action and ombudspersons for infants.

Moral reasoning typically informs environmental decision-making by measuring the possible outcomes of policies or actions in light of a preferred ethical theory. This method is subject to many problems. Environmental pragmatism tries to overcome them, but it suffers also from some pitfalls. This paper proposes a new method of environmental pragmatism that avoids the problems of both the traditional method of environmental moral reasoning and of the general versions of environmental pragmatism. We call it 'justificatory moral pluralism' - it develops the intuition that normative ethical theories need not be mutually exclusive. This leaves room for important forms of pluralist environmental ethics that do not require a once-and-for-all prior commitment to an ethical theory when deciding about policies or courses of action related to the protection of the environment. Justificatory moral pluralism offers a viable solution to the recurrent conflicts between efficient environmental decisions and the need for moral reasoning.

O “paradoxo da liberdade” consiste em esta só poder ser atingida através da obediência, a qual é vista frequentemente como o contrário da liberdade. Neste artigo, demonstrar-se-á que o paradoxo começa por nascer em Maquiavel, o qual, porém, deixa-o em aberto ao colocar a liberdade tão-só dentro de um contexto de governação. Spinoza, contudo, dará um passo em frente na sua abordagem à liberdade política. Ele aborda esta problemática diretamente nos seus dois tratados políticos e ambos expressam o mesmo entendimento da liberdade, embora através de diferentes instâncias terminológicas. A solução spinozana combina um conjunto de critérios variados para a determinação da liberdade política, tanto da perspectiva do indivíduo como da perspectiva do Estado. Todavia, a sua combinação não é simples cumulação, mas sim uma complexa escala permitindo medir a liberdade em graus. Dessa maneira, Spinoza consegue fazer com que diferentes tipos de liberdade se compatibilizem com diferentes tipos de obediência.

This paper aims at answering some of the objections to the NIP’s criticism of the idea of rights of future persons. Those objections usually adopt different perspectives depending on how they understand differently the nature of the correlativity between rights and duties – some adopt a present-rights-of-future-persons view, others a future-rights-of-future-persons view, others a transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view, and others still an eternalist view of rights and persons. The paper will try to show that only a non-transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view can survive the challenges posed by the notion of correlativity inherent in the NIP, and thus preserve rights language when discussing the future. This view is proved also more suitable for the legal and political realms, where policies and law-making are usually more concerned with present addressees and short term effects.

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 368-389, April 2022. Epistemic impairment has been the decisive yardstick when excluding infants from political agency. One of the suggestions to bypass the epistemic requirement of political agency and to encourage the inclusion of infants in representative democracies is to resort to proxies or surrogates who share or advocate interests which may be coincidental with their interests. However, this solution is far from desirable, given that it privileges the political agency of parents, guardians and trustees over other adult citizens. This article offers an alternative to this conceptual frame of reference by making a case for the political agency of infants. Firstly, it maintains that political agency can be understood in terms of the several facets involved in political representation. Secondly, it claims that the all-affected principle can be reformulated as an ‘infant-affected-interests principle’ in light of which infants are members of the class of the represented. Thirdly, it explores the ways through which this political agency can occur without having to resort to alternative conceptions of representation. The conclusion ascertains that infant enfranchisement is highly undesirable and that there are more viable forms to promote infant political agency, such as virtual representation, infant-beneficial principles of political action and ombudspersons for infants.

This paper engages with Suárez’s writings on the origins of political power in order to ascertain whether he can be considered a social contract theorist at all. It focuses on specific details of his consent theory, namely the ‘who’, the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the ‘what for’ of the agreements that originate government. The conclusion shows that even though his systematic treatment of contracts falls short of becoming a social contract theory in the same way as modern contractualist thinkers, he can still be considered a social contract theorist in the tradition of the School of Salamanca.