Anton Leist

Der moralische Kontraktualismus ist neben der kantischen und utilitaristischen Tradition die dritte Haupttradition einer aufgeklärten Moralphilosophie. Seine Kernthese besagt, daß moralische Normen und Forderungen legitim sind, wenn die Betroffenen sich aus ihren Interessen heraus auf die Etablierung dieser Normen hätten einigen können. Eine vernünftige Moral ist demnach, obwohl sie Freiheitsbeschränkungen verlangt, zum gegenseitigen Vorteil der Einzelnen. Die Autoren des Bandes diskutieren im Lichte neuerer Arbeiten die Vorzüge und Schwierigkeiten der moralischen Vertragstheorie. Zentrale Themen sind der Begriff der Moral, das Problem der moralischen Normativität, der Zusammenhang von Moral und Interesse, von Moral und Rationalität sowie die Frage, welche moralischen Normen eine kontraktualistische Theorie konkret zu begründen vermag.

This attempts to draw some teachings out of the surprising event of the war against Ukraine. The occurrence of an unforeseeable shock confronted with the war serves as an investigative method to inform a political judgement. How should one apply the necessary corrections on the political culture of the West? In light of the shock, a revaluation of political realism and a critique of liberal cosmopolitanism are primarily called for. Political realism and Carl Schmitt especially, anathema in German political literature for a long time, help to warn against the pitfalls of a politics largely based on economic interest within and among nations. For this, John Mearsheimer’s power-oriented realism is appreciated in its application to the Ukraine war, but also corrected thanks to culturalist insights derived from Ned Lebow. Schmitt is introduced because of his insistence on an ‘existential’ basis of politics. A combination of different shades of ‘recognition’: recognition through power with recognition through national self-reliance or local nationalism is recommended as an alternative to the unrealistic and potentially dangerous aim of a global liberal democracy.

A great war changes the world. Fighting the temptation to declare it part of normality, this introduction describes three ‘Western’ fallacies which account for the Western perception of a unilateral war of aggression in Europe as unpredictable and shocking. These delusions are the belief that the world is not merely global but cosmopolitan, that the world is on the threshold of perpetual peace, and that there is a widespread trend towards non-violent social relations. We describe the one-sided philosophical motives behind these expectations, and contrast these with the prevalent social motives to nationalism, a hidden compulsion to war, and a persistent habitual cruelty, all of which are found in present Russia or other autocracies. The underlying interest in these analyses is less about deciphering the aggressor than about working towards the question of whether the often-argued thesis of modernisation is more than fiction.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has grave consequences in several political categories. These include: a reassessment of the school of ‘political realism’, one of whose proponents claims to have predicted the war. Was the West partly ‘responsible’ for the war? Second, to what extent does the war of aggression, as an undeniable violation of law, damage the status of international law and justice? Third, the war is embedded in political developments that stretch back a century. It is examined in its context within American foreign policy since the Wilsonian peace programme, in relation to the dangerous reluctance of the EU to pursue a decisive geopolitical policy towards Russia, and interpreted in the light of Stalinist echoes within Russian politics.

Democracy without Shortcuts is written in the shadow of Habermas long-standing idea that democracy should be reconstructed with the help of an ideal discourse. Not to accept shortcuts just means that democrats central normative claim, expressing and defending ones opinion on public matters against co-citizen as a form of autonomy should be realized extensively within the institutional structure of the political society. The book struggles to shed the constraints of this idealistic approach towards democracy by involving it with minipublics and the constitutional law. Nevertheless, if democratic societies are seen a bit more realistically, even an ideal theory (as the one by Lafont and Habermas) is in need of a richer basic vocabulary. The article tries to make these alternatives visible, by help of pointing to the conceptual simplifications in Lafonts scenario.Cristina Lafont, Unverkürzte Demokratie. Eine Theorie deliberativer Bürgerbeteiligung, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021. 447 S.

When we want to justify claims against one another, we discover that conceptual thought alone is not sufficient to legitimize property and income in the relative and proper proportions among members of a productive group. Instead, the basis for justification should also be seen in motivational states, validated less by rational thought than by an effective behaviour. To circumnavigate otherwise dangerously utopian claims to justice, the social sciences, and especially behavioural economics, are the most reliable basis for normative distributive justice. This article builds on recent findings of experiments, first of all in order to give proof of the extent to which a general behavioural tendency towards equality is widespread among people, and second of all in order to highlight ‘desert’ and ‘need’ as the crucial criteria of just distribution, which will then sum up to justified inequality in the economic sphere.