•  1219
    Stability in Liberal Epistocracies
    Social Epistemology 37 (1): 97-109. 2023.
    In this article, I argue that stability is one of the enabling conditions for epistocratic arrangements to function well and justify their claim right to rule. Against this backdrop, I demonstrate that advocates of strategies to allocate exclusive decision-making power to knowledgeable citizens fail to demonstrate that in a context marked by the fact of pluralism, liberal epistocracies will be stable. They could argue that liberal epistocracies will be stable because epistocratic arrangements ar…Read more
  •  955
    Modus Vivendi Arrangements, Stability, and the All-Subjected Principle
    Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Politica 1 (2): 191-20. 2022.
    Despite the importance of the requirement that all parties subject to a modus vivendi accept it, the philosophical basis of the all-subjected principle has been largely neglected in the realist literature on modus vivendi arrangements as responses to disagreements on issues of common concern. In this article, I argue that the inclusion of all-subjected parties should be understood as instrumental to justifying the presupposition that e…Read more
  •  683
    The Place of Voting in the Ethics of Counterspeech
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (4): 595-609. 2023.
    The literature on counterspeech has been debating how institutions and citizens should respond to offensive or dangerous communicative acts. This article identifies a gap in this debate, namely, the lack of attention paid to the individual vote in large-scale democratic elections as an effective act of distancing from candidates who use explicitly derogatory forms of expression to unify and mobilize supporters. In studying the place of voting in the ethics of counterspeech, this article investig…Read more
  •  567
    Democratic Renewal and the Spirit of Democracy
    with Federica Liveriero, Enrico Biale, Steven Klein, Sharon Krause, and Sofia Näsström
    Contemporary Political Theory (forthcoming): 1-23. 2023.
    Taking seriously the task of sustaining the democratic project requires debunking pessimism, thinking critically about what constitutes the distinctive character of democracy, and taking a future-oriented perspective on democratic transformations.
  •  464
    Propositional attitudes, harm and public hate speech situations: towards a maieutic approach
    European Journal of Political Theory 20 (4): 609-630. 2021.
    In this article, I provide an argument against the idea that public hate-speech events are harmful because they cause a discrete, traceable and harmful change in one’s propositional attitudes. To do so, I identify the essential conceptual architecture of public hate-speech situations, I assess existing arguments for the direct and indirect harm of public hate speech and I propose a novel way to approach public hate-speech situations: a maieutic approach. On this perspective, public hate-speech e…Read more
  •  356
    Can Rawlsian Containment of Hateful Viewpoints Be Effective?
    Social Theory and Practice (X): 681-707. 2022.
    While most of the literature has attempted to justify harsh and soft containment given some fundamental commitments of political liberalism, I focus on how justified forms of containment can in themselves be deemed effective. This article shows that a reading of Rawls allows for a comparison of different containment practices based on their capacity to protect the stability of liberal democracies under serious threat. And, in making it possible to compare harsh and soft containment, I evaluate i…Read more
  •  289
    Populist Appeals and Populist Conversations
    Global Justice : Theory Practice Rhetoric 12 (2): 72-93. 2020.
    This article sheds light upon the role of the audience in the construction and amendment of populist representative claims that in themselves strengthen representative-represented relationships and simultaneously strengthen ties between the represented who belong to different constituencies. I argue that changes in populist representative claims can be explained by studying the discursive relationship between a populist representative and the audience as a conversation in which both poles give a…Read more
  •  274
    Starting from the observation that the deterioration of democratic communication is a political problem that requires individual and collective, private and public, actions, I first defend a baseline duty to avoid using expressions that conventionally show a disrespectful attitude toward targeted groups. Then, I develop a set of guidelines that can guide political theorists in distributing additional duties that respect the situated agency of different individuals. I propose two normative constr…Read more
  •  267
    In the light of a study of the di erence between political actors and ordinary citizens as language users, and based on three moral arguments (consequence-based, recognition-based, and complicity-based), we propose that democratic representatives have an imperfect duty to use gender-fair-language in their public communication. In the case of members of the executive, such as ministries, prime ministries, and presidents, such an imperfect duty could also be justi ed on democratic grounds. Their c…Read more
  •  169
    Discorsi d'odio come pratiche ordinarie
    Biblioteca Della Libertà 224 (LIV): 55-75. 2019.
    We are often told that public hate speech is something that deviates from what is standard in contemporary liberal democracies. So far, much of the literature has focused on the allegedly bad effects of such deviations as well as on measures to bring liberal democracies back to the normal course of events. Less has been said on the fundamental assumption that at a certain moment in time, and within that political context, hate speech is out of the ordinary. In this paper, drawing upon pragmatics…Read more
  •  151
    Conceptual Formation in Global Thinking: Desk-bounds, Globetrotters, and Pathfinders. Editor’s Introduction
    Philosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche 9 (3): 3-12. 2019.
    If a theory addressing problems that are global in scope aims to be convincing outside its own tradition, it should be robust-enough to deal with the simple observation that, around the world, there are multiple systems of norms, rules and institutionalized normative orders.
  •  53
    Counterspeech and Ordinary Citizens: How? When?
    Political Theory 49 (6): 1021-1047. 2021.
    Central to the still-nascent normative literature on counterspeech is the widespread belief that citizens should engage discursively with haters and the effects of hate speech. It is also increasingly clear that discursive engagement with intolerant members of society should be understood as a continuous and extended series of different and connected actions. Much less has been said about the ways that attempts in persuasion and direct responses to hate speech relate to one another and about whe…Read more
  •  27
    Towards a more plural political theory of pluralism
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 47 (10): 1154-1175. 2020.
    In the last two decades, an ever-increasing number of scholars have challenged the conceptual borders of political philosophy and the supposed universalism of its normative pre-commitments. Surprisingly enough, the normative underpinnings of this debate have had very little impact on contemporary disputes about pluralism. This article asks how contemporary disputes about the conceptual borders of political theory can help in constructing a more plural theory of pluralism. It shows that such cont…Read more
  •  23
    Editorial ‘The Theory and Practice of Counterspeech’
    with Enes Kulenović
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (4): 489-492. 2023.
  •  21
    A progressive approach to normative political theorizing
    European Journal of Political Theory. forthcoming.
    In this article, we argue that a progressive approach to normative political theorizing should incorporate a conception of meaningful political change that is nonutopian (it conceives of advancements as gradual stages), large-scale (it involves the largest possible numbers of organized and unorganized social movements), and democratically emancipatory (it displays a commitment to breaking down the barriers that prevent individuals from feeling responsible for the direction of society). Bearing t…Read more
  •  9
    In this book, I argue for an audience-based approach to the study of hate speech understood as a social phenomenon.
  •  8
    Perspectives that Matter (review)
    Krisis 39 (1): 119-122. 2019.
    Review of: Ryan Muldoon Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance. New York: Routledge. 142 pp.
  •  5
    Democratic renewal and the spirit of democracy
    with Enrico Biale, Steven Klein, Sharon R. Krause, Federica Liveriero, and Sofia Näsström
    Contemporary Political Theory 23 (3): 433-455. 2024.
  • This chapter delves into debates about time and democratic deliberation. Deliberative democrats have developed sequential models but tend to think of time mainly as a background variable. Critics have drawn attention to the inadequacy of deliberation in accelerated society but, in so doing, have conflated arguments about the pace of democratic deliberation with arguments about its durational time. Democratic deliberation may be slow and inconclusive, but one aspect does not necessarily entail th…Read more
  • Una definizione di "migrante"
    Rivista di Filosofia 2021 (3): 409-26. 2021.
    Despite the increasingly large number of philosophers working on the ethics of migration, no sustained attempt has been made to define the «migrant» in an analytic way. In their very sophisticated arguments, normative theorists tend to accept the language and pre-commitments shaping migration policy. This paper takes a more foundational approach to the study of migration. By drawing upon ongoing disputes about territorial rights, I construct a general and inclusive definition of «migrant» based …Read more
  • In this article, I argue that the experimentalist model of democracy can contribute to contemporary disputes about deliberation at the supranational level. The fundamental idea is that, in conditions of disagreement, for a decision to be legitimate, deliberative decision-making processes must be structured so as to allow the inclusion of affected interests before and after voting. I argue that there are three ways for a decision to be illegitimate: exclusion of affected interests from all delibe…Read more
  • Democratic Representation and Democratic Sanctions
    Representation 3 (54): 201-19. 2018.
    In this paper, I argue that citizens have an entitlement to sanction representatives, but representatives have tools to anticipate this sanction and reconstruct their views in order to anticipate the views of the people they are supposed to represent. I also argue that represented and representatives have an entitlement to sanction democratic representative institutions and practices, but, unless citizens across the spectrum of all representative relationships agree on many fronts, sanctions are…Read more