Enrico Biale

Quali obblighi abbiamo nei confronti delle persone future, se vogliamo davvero realizzare una società in cui tutte le persone siano trattate da libere ed eguali? Affrontare questa question richiede di ripensare sia il dibattito sulla teoria della giustizia che quello relativo alla teoria della democrazia. Per quanto, infatti, possa sembrare intuitivo sostenere che una società giusta non dovrebbe considerare esclusivamente gli interessi delle persone presenti, l’elaborazione di tale intuizione solleva interrogativi complessi: come è possibile garantire che persone future abbiano una voce in capitolo nelle attuali decisioni? È giusto dare peso a questi interessi visto che il futuro è molto incerto? Come possiamo trattare come eguali individui che non solo non esistono qui ed ora ma potrebbero non esistere in futuo? Questa sezione speciale della Rivista di Filosofia Politica si propone di affrontare queste sfide.

Although sport is a social practice with a long history and one that now holds a certain more or less direct relevance in the lives of many people, the philosophical analysis of this phenomenon is fairly recent. While some contributions were presented as early as the 1930s, the philosophy of sport as an autonomous discipline only developed from the 1970s onward. Whereas the earliest contributions were situated within the philosophy of education and regarded sport as a vehicle for the formation of the individual, more recent literature has begun to apply philosophical methods and concepts to every domain of sporting practice. As we shall see in this brief and inevitably partial reconstruction of the debate, in recent years metaphysical, ontological, aesthetic, ethical, and political questions have been examined. Although the topics addressed are many, those that will be analyzed in greater detail concern the nature of sport, doping, fandom, and the inclusion of women. The final section deals with two areas – esports and combat sports – that are emerging and will, in our view, undergo significant development in the coming years.

This book develops an innovative paradigm of public ethics that provides a unique insight into three central themes – recognition, social conflicts and democratic distortions – while critically celebrating the work of Anna Elisabetta Galeotti. In honor of her seventieth birthday, this edited collection brings together leading scholars in the field of normative political philosophy to reason upon the main strands of her research. The volume envisages a general paradigm of public ethics to deal with social conflicts that involve structural dynamics and deliberative deficits. While addressing diverse yet interrelated topics, all the contributors demonstrate a commitment to the ideal that, in the construction and reform of social and political institutions, respect for individuals as the makers of their own lives should act as the guiding principle. Against this backdrop, this volume strikes a difficult-to-reach balance between refined theorizing over classical themes of the liberal tradition and the ability to open these classic themes to new strands of research. The collection deals with crucial contemporary challenges to the democratic order, such as democratic backsliding and the breach of social trust, legal and democratic fights over free speech, multicultural clashes in highly diverse societies, and reparation for historical wrong.

This paper analyses the possibility of granting legitimacy to democratic decisionmaking procedures in a context of deep pluralism. We defend a multidimensional account according to which a legitimate system needs to grant, on the one hand, that citizens should be included on an equal footing and acknowledged as reflexive political agents rather than mere beneficiaries of policies, and, on the other hand, that their decisions have an epistemic quality. While Estlund’s account of imperfect epistemic proceduralism might seem to embody a dualistic conception of democratic legitimacy, we point out that it is not able to recognize citizens as reflexive political agents and is grounded in an idealized model of the circumstances of deliberation. To overcome these ambiguities, we develop an account of democratic legitimacy according to which disagreement is the proper expression of citizens’ reflexive agency and the attribution of epistemic authority does not stem from a major expertise or specific ability, but it comes through the public confrontation among disagreeing agents. Consequently, the epistemic value of deliberation should be derived from the reasons-giving process rather than from the reference to the alleged quality of its outcomes. In this way, we demonstrate the validity of the multidimensional perspective of legitimacy, yet abstain from introducing any outcome-oriented criterion. Finally, we argue that this account of legitimacy is well suited for modeling deliberative democracy as a decision-making procedure that respects the agency of every citizen and grants her opportunity to influence public choices.

In ageing societies, demographic trends increasingly create a representation gap and skew political influence towards older generations, leaving younger citizens structurally disadvantaged in shaping and controlling collective decisions. The present study contends that the existing proposals aimed at empowering young people, including the lowering of the voting age, the implementation of age-weighted voting, and the introduction of youth quotas, are inadequate in addressing the fundamental democratic inequities experienced by young individuals. It is important to note that these approaches either misrepresent youth disadvantage as analogous to the structural oppression experienced by historically marginalised groups or rely excessively on electoral means to grant young people meaningful political control. It is argued that the political exclusion of youth is qualitatively distinct, rooted in their temporal marginality and lack of stable group identity over time. In order to address this issue, the introduction of contestation arenas is proposed. These democratic innovations enable citizens to scrutinise and veto political decisions that misrecognise their interests. In contradistinction to deliberative mini publics, these arenas embrace conflict and partiality, thereby allowing politicised interests to challenge representative decisions through structured contestation. The paper posits that contestation arenas offer a medium for active democratic control, political visibility, and symbolic recognition, particularly suited to the modes of participation favoured by younger citizens. By facilitating agency and equal authorship over decisions, such arenas promise a more robust democratic system capable of addressing generational asymmetries without undermining the legitimacy of existing electoral structures.

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 this in mind, such an approach should be organized around a cooperative effort between theorists and agents of change and should be oriented toward the collective construction of large-scale actionable proposals for social and political change here and now.

From within a “systemic approach” to deliberative democracy, political parties can be seen as crucial actors in facilitating deliberation, by playing epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions that are central to the deliberative ideal. However, we point out that if we assume a purely outcome-oriented conception of the role of parties within a deliberative system, we risk losing sight of a central tenet of deliberative democracy and of its distinctive principle of legitimacy, namely, that citizens must be able to exercise critical reflection on the grounds of democratic decisions. We argue that parties have a special responsibility in making a deliberative system meet this requirement, and that such special role can be fulfilled only if parties’ programs, values, and strategies are shaped through intra-party deliberation. On the grounds of this discussion, we define a model of intra-party deliberation that is based on the principles of mutual acceptability, pluralism, and publicity.

The chapters in this book deal with different, though related, topics concerning the tense relationship between democracy and diversity. On the one hand, social diversity represents an opportunity, widening the horizon of social options and perspectives of innovation, but, on the other hand, it creates problems for the social cohesion and peaceful coexistence of many groups, be they majority or minority. The chapters depart from the intrinsic connection between democracy and diversity – and the unavoidable challenges that pluralism poses to decision-making procedures – investigating, from different perspectives, how the normative requirement of fully respecting agents’ reflexive agency impacts the revision of democratic decision-making procedures and the way in which institutions react to citizens’ justice-based claims.

In this paper I will hold that it is desirable to ensure people be included within the borders and the political community both, but I will point out the potential incompatibility of the two. In an open-borders society, members of a polity would not be exclusively individuals who expect to stay in a country for a long time but also people who temporarily work and live there. Among this latter group would be individuals who would continuously migrate—call them hypermigrants. While I agree that hypermigrants cannot be fully included in the decision making, excluding them is problematic because it justifies a hierarchical society. The case of hypermigrants points to the tension between treating people as equals by including them in a democratic system whose members do not simply support their own interests but strive for the common good and by including them in an open-borders society that acknowledges their life plans as of equal worth. To overcome these problems I will claim that it is possible to justify an account of a fluid demos that provides different levels of political inclusion and addresses the challenges of a hypermigration polity. In this account, citizenship and full political inclusion are granted to permanent members only but hypermigrants are partially included. This perspective recognises every member of the polity as equal and ensures that she has control over the relevant political decisions without undermining the idea that citizenship requires a sense of belonging to the political community and concern for its long-term interests.