Krzysztof Kedziora

Poland has faced two waves of migration: the first was of irregular asylum seekers, which led to the humanitarian crisis on the eastern EU–Belarusian border since 2021; the second was of Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion. Although there are noticeable differences between these situations, and between the different reactions of the Polish authorities, it is possible to juxtapose them in terms of the right to health. The normative content of refugee and human rights law is the starting point for reconstructing the meaning of the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘right to health’. A refugee is a person who needs international protection because of a well-founded fear of harm, which is not limited to persecution as defined by the Refugee Convention but also includes situations of international and non-international armed conflict. The right to health, which includes, inter alia, entitlements to a ‘system of health protection’ and ‘underlying determinations of health’, is reconstructed on the basis of human rights law and refugee and migration law. There are no legal and moral grounds to grant the right to health differentially to different groups of refugees. Nondiscriminatory health policy requires that refugees have the same access to health care as nationals, although their specific health needs resulting from past experiences and refugee situation require special treatment, that is, an appropriate refugee health policy. The broad understanding of the underlying determinants of health demonstrates the importance of overall migration policy for refugees’ health, which can jeopardise the fragile good of refugee health.

The debate between Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls concerns the question of how to do political philosophy under conditions of cultural pluralism, if the aim of political philosophy is to uncover the normative foundation of a modern liberal democracy. Rawls’s political liberalism tries to bypass the problem of pluralism, using the intellectual device of the veil of ignorance, and yet paradoxically at the same time it treats it as something given and as an arbiter of justification within the political conception of justice. Habermas argues that Rawls not only incorrectly operationalizes the moral point of view from which we discern what is just but also fails to capture the specificity of democracy which is given by internal relations between politics and law. This deprives Rawls’s political philosophy of the conceptual tools needed to articulate the normative foundation of democracy.

The so-called debate between Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls concentrated mainly on the latter’s political liberalism. It dealt with the many aspects of Rawls’s philosophical project. In this article, I focus only on one of them, namely the epistemic or cognitivistic nature of principles of justice. The first part provides an overview of the debate, while the second part aims to show that Habermas has not misinterpreted Rawls’s position. I argue that Habermas rightly considers Rawls’s conception of justice as a moral one. In the last part, I discuss two key questions raised by Habermas. The first concerns the relation between justification and acceptance of the principles of justice. The second concerns the relation between two validity terms: truth and reasonableness.

STANISŁAW BRZOZOWSKI – TO THINK RADICALLY Stanisław Brzozowski is one of the most radical philosophers. Radicalism of his thought involves not only the idea of fundamental social change, but also the reinterpretation of some philosophical concepts. Two main concepts are nature and history. They are reinterpreted in order to show their human origins. According to Brzozowski nature and history are human constructions, namely they are set by human praxis. Brzozowski’s understanding changed over the time. In my article I focus on two phases of Brzozowski’s thought. The first is Kantian and Fichtean. At that point Brzozowski interprets human praxis as moral act. The second one is Marxian. At that point human praxis is understood as labour.

W artykule zaprezentowane zostały zarówno podobieństwa, jak i różnice w rozumieniu projektu teorii moralnej u Henry’ego Sidgwicka i Johna Rawlsa. W pierwszej części omówione zostało rozumienie teorii moralnej przez autora The Methods of Ethics, w części drugiej przedstawiono koncepcję Rawlsa jako kontynuację, pod pewnymi względami, dzieła Sidgwicka. Według tego ostatniego teoria moralna jest porównawczą analizą różnych metod etyki odkrywanych w potocznej świadomości moralnej. Teoria moralna jest niezależna od metafizyki i psychologii oraz rozstrzygnięć właściwych dla nich problemów, takich jak problem wolnej woli czy źródeł władzy moralnej. Autor Teorii sprawiedliwości bezpośrednio nawiązuje do rozumienia teorii moralnej przedsta-wionego przez Sidgwicka. John Rawls stwierdza: „przez »teorię moralną« rozumiem systematyczne i porównawcze badanie koncepcji moralnych, zaczynając od tych, które historycznie i według obecnych szacunków wydają się najbardziej istotne”. Należy podkreślić niezależność teorii moralnej rozumianej jako etyka normatywna od innych dziedzin filozofii. Zadaniem filozofii moralnej jest rozwiązanie zagadnień powiązanych z tradycyjną problematyką filozoficzną, które dotyczą na przykład istnienia prawdy moralnej. Odpowiedzi udzielane przez filozofię moralną zależą od pogłębienia naszego rozumienia struktur koncepcji moralnych.