Fabian Wendt

Gerechtigkeit ist ein wichtiger Wert, aber nur einer unter vielen. Für die Frage, welche und wie viele Flüchtlinge wir aufnehmen sollten, ist insbesondere der Wert sozialen Friedens von zentraler Bedeutung. Der Essay skizziert zunächst, was man aus der Perspektive der Gerechtigkeit über Flüchtlingspolitik sagen kann. Da manchmal Gerechtigkeit und sozialer Frieden für in der einen oder anderen Weise eng verbunden erachtet werden, versucht er danach zu zeigen, dass sozialer Frieden ein eigenständiger, von Gerechtigkeit unabhängiger Wert ist. In einem dritten Schritt wird dann erörtert, was aus der Perspektive sozialen Friedens zu der Frage zu sagen ist, welche und wie viele Flüchtlinge wir aufnehmen sollten.

In diesem Beitrag zeichne ich erstens Nozicks Kritik an strukturellen Gerechtigkeitstheorien nach und überlege, was sie wirklich zu zeigen vermag und was nicht; zweitens diskutiere ich, ob Nozicks Anspruchstheorie durch das von ihm akzeptierte „Lockesche Proviso“ ebenfalls strukturell ist; drittens stelle ich zwei Gerechtigkeitstheorien vor, die die Lehren von Nozicks Kritik an strukturellen Gerechtigkeitstheorien annehmen, ohne deswegen gleich alle strukturellen Prinzipien über Bord zu werfen: Den „Links-Libertarismus“ und den „moderaten Libertarismus“. Beide kombinieren eine Anspruchstheorie mit einem strukturellen Prinzip, und bei beiden Theorien nimmt das strukturelle Prinzip die Form eines Lockeschen Provisos an.

Auf einer Zwillingserde teilt Julian Nida-Rümelins Alter Ego dessen philosophische Grundüberzeugungen: den Pragmatismus, den Kohärentismus, den anthropologischen Humanismus und den unaufgeregten Realismus. Was die politische Philosophie angeht, steht er allerdings fest in der klassisch-liberalen bzw. libertären Tradition von John Locke, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek und Robert Nozick. Durch einen metaphysischen Unfall gelangen die Werke des hiesigen Nida-Rümelin in die Hände seines Alter Ego. In diesem Text erfahren wir von dessen Leseeindrücken.

When we compromise on justice, we accept or acquiesce to an arrangement that we judge to be unjust, or at least not fully just. Such arrangements are often described as constituting a ‘modus vivendi’. What reasons could we have to accept a modus vivendi, thereby compromising on justice? Given the fact of disagreement on justice, this is an important, but rather neglected question in political philosophy. One possible answer, inspired by John Rawls, is that compromising on justice is only justified if this nonetheless brings us as close to ideal justice as possible under given circumstances. The most straightforward way to take issue with this answer is to present other reasons to compromise on justice. The articles in this book explore epistemic reasons and those that stem from values besides justice, like democracy, peace, toleration and non-subjugation. This book thereby sheds some light on the relevance of compromising for the legitimacy of institutional arrangements. It was previously published as a special issue of the Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy (Vol. 16, No. 4, 2013).

Democratic party politics requires compromises. A question that has hardly been tackled in normative political theory is how political parties ought to navigate these compromises. In this paper, I would like to explore this question from the specific perspective of classical liberal political parties. My focus will mostly be on parties in Western European countries with proportional representation and multi-party systems like Denmark, Germany, or the Netherlands, where liberal parties have often taken an active role in coalition governments.

This paper defends the view that the limits of compromise are identical with the moral principles that set limits to human action more generally. Moral principles that prohibit lying, stealing, or killing, for example, sometimes make it morally impermissible to accept a compromise proposal, for the simple reason that the proposal involves an act of lying, killing, or stealing. The same holds for any other moral principle that sets limits to human action. This may sound straightforward and, perhaps, trivial. Yet in the philosophical literature, discussions of the limits of compromise have singled out more specific principles: Avishai Margalit proposes that the limits of compromise are set by the value of humanity, Simon May points at racial equality and more generally democratic legitimacy, Alexander Ruser and Amanda Machin appeal to the value of integrity, and a fourth at least initially plausible account invokes the idea of public justifiability. After discussing in greater detail what an account of the limits of compromise may be expected to do, the paper will show that none of these accounts is convincing.

Lockeans regard taxation as a—perhaps sometimes permissible—infringement of moral property entitlements. This essay discusses whether, or in what form, this charge is defensible. In doing so, it will explore the truth and the limits of the conventionalist reply of Murphy and Nagel to Lockean challenges to taxation. It argues that there is a moral rationale for property conventions that is independent of the question whether and how one can acquire natural, pre-conventional property rights in the state of nature, that this rationale sets a moral standard for how good property conventions are and whether they are justifiable at all, and that once property conventions are in place, people’s moral property entitlements are at least partly determined by these conventions, sometimes even by unjustifiable ones that ought to be reformed. Because taxation can be a part of property conventions, taxation as such is not an infringement of moral property entitlements. But the essay will also argue that some taxation—excessive taxation—does infringe on moral property entitlements. This is because the moral rationale for property conventions sets some standards for what owners should be entitled to, and so excessive taxation will infringe upon moral entitlements that are partly not convention-based.

The article argues that persons should be conceived as self-owners and entitled to acquire private property within justifiable property conventions because they should be able to live as project pursuers. This is the ‘project pursuit argument’. It leads to a conception of self-ownership that is stringent, but weaker than standard libertarian notions of self-ownership, and to an understanding of private property as a convention that has to meet a sufficientarian threshold in order to be justifiable.

After the parliamentary elections in Germany in September 2017, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU), The Greens (Bündnis90/Die Grünen) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) started to negotiate about forming a coalition government. But, surprising to many, the FDP decided to let these coalition talks collapse, and many commentators in Germany found it highly problematic for a political party to refuse to take responsibility in government. Interestingly, the question whether (or: when) democratic parties may legitimately refuse to govern has so far been neglected in political theory and political philosophy. The article develops a general answer by discussing several possible reasons for thinking that it is sometimes wrong to refuse to govern and thereby engages both democratic theory and the recent literature on compromise. The resulting view is that parties have an ‘integrity prerogative’ that allows them to refuse to govern, except when there is no reasonable and stable alternative government coalition available.

Public reason liberals from John Rawls to Gerald Gaus uphold a principle of public justification as a core commitment of their theories. Critics of public reason liberalism have sometimes conceded that there is something compelling about the idea of public justification. But so far there have not been many attempts to elaborate and defend a ‘comprehensive’ liberalism that incorporates a principle of public justification. This article spells out how public justifiability could be integrated into a comprehensive liberalism and defends the claim that what is worthwhile about public justification can be extracted from public reason liberalism.