Francesco Testini

The institution of legal punishment, according to penal abolitionists, should be abandoned. But can we do without it? In this paper, I tackle this question and provide a tentative positive answer. Drawing on evidence from the social sciences, I argue that legal punishment has been crucial to enable cooperation in large-scale societies, but this does not mean that it is indispensable for this end today, as alternatives are available. I support this claim by defending one of such alternatives, namely pure restitution, from several crippling objections. My defense of restitution modifies the underlying theory, making it considerably less pure in a sense I shall specify, but also more promising as a potential alternative to legal punishment.

Tutti concordano che la conformità di un’azione ai dettami della morale non è sufficiente per conferirle valore morale. Tale valore dipende dalle motivazioni con cui l’agente la compie. L’azione giusta deve essere compiuta per le ragioni giuste. Ma quali ragioni sono quelle giuste? Kant ha una visione notoriamente restrittiva in merito: solo le azioni compiute esclusivamente per senso del dovere hanno valore morale. Diversi kantiani hanno optato per requisiti motivazionali a prima vista più indulgenti. Qui sostengo, tuttavia, che c’è un problema comune a tutte queste concezioni: siccome è difficile soddisfare i loro requisiti e sapere quando sono soddisfatti, è difficile per l’agente sapere se le sue azioni hanno valore morale e se egli è quindi degno di lode. Questo problema costituisce una forma soggettiva di alienazione che si esprime in quella che chiamo “la sindrome dell’impostore morale”. Uso questo spunto per supportare una concezione alternativa del valore morale, meno esposta a questo problema.

[BOOK IN ITALIAN] Political philosophy is primarily a normative discipline. It is concerned with establishing what we ought to do—how to organize society, how to share burdens and benefits, what institutions we should have and how to regulate them. Genealogy, on the other hand, is a purely empirical type of inquiry, which aims to reconstruct the causal history of our ideas, concepts, practices, and institutions. Contrary to much of the orthodoxy of the field, which draws a sharp distinction between facts and values, causes and reasons, this book argues that the kind of understanding offered by genealogy is highly useful for the normative purposes of political philosophy, and proceeds to demonstrate this with concrete examples. Standing within an intellectual tradition whose forerunners include Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Bernard Williams, and in dialogue with contemporary political theory, it will be of interest to philosophers willing to reflect critically on what philosophy is and how it should be done.

The debate on moral norms and standards is as old as philosophy itself. But social norms and conventions have finally started attracting their fair share of attention too. Their authority is the topic of two sophisticated books published in the last few years, namely David Owens’ Bound by Convention (2022) and Laura Valentini’s Morality and Socially Constructed Norms (2023). In this essay, I present the theoretical outlooks of these two books and then proceed to criticize both. First, I point out a small but significant flaw in Valentini’s ontological account of social norms, according to which such norms obtain in virtue of the beliefs and commitments of rule-followers. More specifically, I argue that such an account – to make sense – should include a reference to the desires of rule followers too. Then, I develop Valentini's crucial criticism against Owens, according to which Owens' account cannot make sense of the obligatory character of certain social norms. In this respect I argue that Owens’ answer to such criticism fails in a way that reveals even deeper flaws than Valentini recognizes.

The idea of a distinctively political normativity came under sustained fire lately. Here I formulate, test, and reject a moderate and promising way of conceiving it. According to this conception, political normativity is akin to the kind of normativity at play in all-things-considered judgments, i.e., those judgments that weigh together all the relevant reasons to determine what practical rationality as such requires to do. I argue that even when we try to conceive political normativity in this all-things-considered way, and even when we do not concede from the get-go that moral reasons necessarily trump or override normative reasons of a different kind, political normativity is still reducible to morality, because the peculiar content of all-things-considered political oughts can be explained by the interplay of general moral principles and contextual facts that do not obtain exclusively in political scenarios. If my arguments are correct, I provide political realists with one more reason to withdraw from the metaethical battle over the idea of a distinctively political normativity and show that the moralist approach is defensible against a prima facie promising, but ultimately untenable, alternative.

Pragmatic vindicatory genealogies provide both a cause and a rationale and can thus affect the space of reasons. But how far is the space of reasons affected by this kind of genealogical argument? What normative and evaluative implications do these arguments have? In this paper, I unpack this issue into three different sub-questions and explain what kinds of reasons they provide, for whom are these reasons, and for what. In relation to this final sub-question I argue, most importantly, that these arguments are ambiguous about what they give us reasons for, meaning that they can be interpreted both as justifications for recognizing the normative standing of certain norms, values, and practices - and thus for living by them - and as excuses for those that do so. I illustrate this point by reference to the genealogical vindication of honour cultures, showing how the vindicatory argument can illuminate such case as one of excusing moral ignorance. Drawing on legal theory and moral philosophy, I show that different evaluative and normative implications hang on the result of the interpretation as either justification or excuse, and show that this ambiguity is a virtue rather than a limitation.

Se la tradizione continentale, da Nietzsche a Foucault, ha sottolineato le implicazioni critiche e destabilizzanti del metodo genealogico, gli approcci analitici hanno dimostrato che esso può anche offrire sostegno ai propri oggetti di indagine: norme comportamentali, pratiche, concetti e così via. Un resoconto genealogico, per esempio, può avere un carattere giustificativo quando individua una relazione funzionale necessaria tra il concetto o la pratica in esame e bisogni umani abbastanza fondamentali. La questione che voglio affrontare riguarda le presunte capacità giustificative di questo tipo di spiegazioni genealogiche. In che misura modificano davvero lo spazio delle ragioni? Sostengo che la loro portata normativa e valutativa è variabile e che l'esame di alcuni casi limite aiuta a dimostrarlo. Più specificamente, ritengo che in alcuni casi le ragioni offerte attraverso queste spiegazioni siano ragioni non tanto per giustificare l'uso di certi concetti o pratiche, quanto per scusare coloro che li utilizzano e vi prendono parte.

Kant’s philosophy is notoriously based on the dichotomy between the phenomenal and the noumenal world. This dichotomy digs a rift across human nature by separating the animal and the rational parts of it, its heteronomous and autonomous components, duty and self-love. Human beings, for Kant, inhabit both worlds. Such a dychotomy, according to Sasha Mudd, gives rise to two forms of alienation: moral alienation (the estrangement of the heteronomous agent, motivated by happiness and inclinations, from a morality perceived as alien, foreign, and hardly motivating) and practical alienation (the estrangement of the autonomous moral agent from her empirical and heteronomous dimension – her projects, desires, aspirations, inclinations, and so on). On Mudd’s account, Kant successfully escape the first kind of alienation through his doctrine of respect. Here I argue, contra Mudd, that there are at least two ways in which Kant leaves moral agents morally alienated, i.e., alienated from morality itself.

[BOOK IN ITALIAN] Bernard Williams is universally recognised as one of the most important voices in 20th century moral and political philosophy. Yet his thought has only rarely been the subject of comprehensive analysis and interpretation: more often, attention has focused on his celebrated critiques of specific theoretical paradigms, such as the Kantian and the utilitarian ones. This book attempts to fill this gap. Considering Williams' work in its entirety, it reconstructs the particular and fascinating picture of moral philosophy that emerges from it. The ideal of ethical objectivity acts as a thread running through this reconstruction. More precisely, the basic question guiding the investigation is what remains of this ideal once Williams' critique of three fundamental ideas for moral philosophy has been sifted: that of normative theory, that of ethical knowledge and that of human nature (understood as a possible basis for objective ethical prescriptions). The answer, in a nutshell, is 'very little'. But this does not imply an abandonment to relativism. Rather, the answer implies the need to become aware of the historicity of our values and to re-examine them from a peculiar point of view, both historical and philosophical, in order to assess which ones deserve our trust. As suggested in this book, in the last years of his life Williams offered many useful insights for doing this.

Questo breve scritto si propone di ripercorrere sinteticamente alcuni nodi fondamentali del dibattito filosofico tra Bernard Williams e Martha Nussbaum sul significato e sul valore etico della rappresentazione tragica non tanto all’interno del mondo greco quanto per la contemporaneità. Si cercherà di mostrare lo scarto tra le diverse concezioni dei due autori a partire dalle differenti interpretazioni che essi forniscono dell’Agamennone di Eschilo, e dei diversi giudizi che essi formulano nei confronti del protagonista e della sua vicenda. Gli obiettivi delle argomentazioni che seguono sono principalmente due: innanzitutto evidenziare come in alcune delle critiche mosse dalla filosofa americana al collega britannico siano rinvenibili spunti fondamentali per quella che si ritiene una più completa comprensione della tragedia come caso limite del conflitto tra soggetto etico e mondo; in secondo luogo, attraverso una riproposizione del conflitto di valori in termini di conflitto di ruoli, produrre una giustificazione del giudizio di Nussbaum su Agamennone compatibile con l’approccio di Williams.

L’anno appena trascorso è stato dimenticabile (per ovvie ragioni) e i filosofi politici hanno una ragione in più per dimenticarlo data la prematura scomparsa di Gerald Gaus. Tuttavia, essi potrebbero forse trovare una qualche consolazione nel fatto che il 2020 ha visto la pubblicazione di due notevoli opere dedicate alla loro disciplina: 'Utopohobia', di David Estlund e 'What is Political Philosophy?', di Charles Larmore. In questo saggio, dopo aver offerto una sintesi criminalmente breve del nucleo argomentativo dei due volumi, li metterò in dialogo, usando le risorse dell'uno per interrogare e problematizzare alcune tesi dell'altro (e viceversa).

Scholarship in rhetorical political analysis and parliamentary studies devoted little attention to study how politicians employ intellectuals’ authority and theories in their discourses. We offer methodological directions to navigate this territory, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses to investigate the employment of Machiavelli’s figure in the Italian Parliament. We show that Machiavelli is regarded as a contested authority and that appeals to his arguments can perform different rhetorical functions, which are countered with different rhetorical tactics. In particular, we show that the right appropriates the realist Machiavelli, especially in foreign policy, both as a national symbol and as a legitimate source of insights on political affairs, while the left and the centre resist these claims with alternative rhetorical tactics. Finally, we provide an original dataset and a new theoretical framework for future explorations of intellectuals and other authoritative figures’ rhetorical influence on politics.

In this paper, I argue that one approach to normative political theory, namely contextualism, can benefit from a specific kind of historical inquiry, namely genealogy, because the latter provides a solution to a deep-seated problem for the former. This problem consists in a lack of critical distance and originates from the justificatory role that contextualist approaches attribute to contextual facts. I compare two approaches to genealogical reconstruction, namely the historiographical method pioneered by Foucault and the hybrid method of pragmatic genealogy as practiced by Bernard Williams, arguing that they both ensure an increase in critical distance while preserving contextualism’s distinctiveness. I also show, however, that only the latter provides normative action-guidance and can thus assist the contextualist theorist in the crucial task of discerning how far certain contextual facts deserve their justificatory role. I prove this point by showing how a pragmatic genealogy of the practice of punishment can inform the contextualist’s reflection about the role this practice should play in a transitional scenario, i.e. in the set of circumstances societies go through in the aftermath of large-scale violence and human rights violations.

Starting from the ‘Dewey Lectures’, Rawls presents his conception of justice within a contextualist framework, as an elaboration of the basic ideas embedded in the political culture of liberal-democratic societies. But how are these basic ideas to be justified? In this article, I reconstruct and criticize Rawls’s strategy to answer this question. I explore an alternative strategy, consisting of a genealogical argument of a pragmatic kind – the kind of argument provided by authors like Bernard Williams, Edward Craig and Miranda Fricker. I outline this genealogical argument drawing on Rawls’s reconstruction of the origins of liberalism. Then, I clarify the conditions under which this kind of argument maintains vindicatory power. I claim that the argument satisfies these conditions and that pragmatic genealogy can thus partially vindicate the basic ideas of liberal-democratic societies.