Nunzio Alì

Questo articolo sostiene che il cambiamento climatico antropogenico rappresenti una minaccia fondamentale alle condizioni oggettive di giustizia e alla stabilità delle istituzioni politiche future in modo diretto, e solo indirettamente agli individui futuri. Nello spirito della teoria rawlsiana, difende una posizione di sufficientarismo istituzionale intergenerazionale, secondo cui le istituzioni politiche a cui partecipano le generazioni attuali hanno un dovere di giustizia di prevenire future catastrofi politiche attraverso azioni immediate a favore del clima. Le misure volte a garantire le condizioni oggettive di giustizia per le istituzioni future possono avere implicazioni distributive e politiche significative per le democrazie liberali, soprattutto in termini di costi socioeconomici. Pertanto, sosteniamo politiche climatiche che affrontino le disuguaglianze socioeconomiche rafforzando al contempo l’inclusività e l’efficacia delle istituzioni democratiche.

A major issue in the philosophy of human rights today concerns the divide between the orthodox and the political/practical view. The former focuses on and emphasizes the moral dimension of human rights, the latter their political/legal function. The present article displays the main strengths and weaknesses of each competing conception by providing a thorough analysis of all relevant theoretical aspects of the issue as well as of its practical significance. It then sustains that a compelling theory should include a social conception of human dignity in the grammar of human rights - as suggested by Buchanan's and Forst's interpretations - which takes into due consideration the equal status of human beings, and in doing so it is able to reveal all the complexity of the notion of human dignity, in particular in its intersubjective dimension. Thus, we might obtain an essential mediation between the moral dimension and political/legal function of human rights, in a way that covers almost entirely the list of human rights as it is spelled out in the major official documents, and secures adequate normative force for their justification.

Limitarianism takes an important step towards an appropriate concern in normative theory about the danger that financial power can pose to political equality. Despite its significant merits, this paper will show that Robeyns’ proposal still has serious shortcomings. These criticisms pave the way for an alternative proposal that we call proportional justice. In the first section, we briefly reconstruct the limitarian approach. In the second section, we formulate a series of criticisms that expose the inadequacies of limitarianism. In the third section we explain how proportional justice is better equipped than limitarianism to defend political equality.

Although equality of opportunity is a fundamental idea of the egalitarian project, there is a continuing controversy about the effective distributive implications of the notion. This paper focuses on this controversy, and maintains that when equality of opportunity is correctly understood, it entails strong distributive implications. In this way, this paper intends to reject the notion that equality of opportunity is associated with a non-institutional idea of meritocracy: an idea which is often used as an ideological tool to make unacceptable inequalities seem acceptable. This paper defends the argument that only an ‘institution-dependent’ conception of equality of opportunity, such as Rawls’ fair equality opportunity, is the most adequate interpretation for a liberal democratic society. Nonetheless, it does not mean that individual merit has no place in liberal democratic societies. Fair equality of opportunity - if correctly understood - is deeply relevant and might contribute to a significant reduction of economic inequality, much more so than is currently perceived in the public debate.

The background position of this paper is that an excessive economic inequality between the most and the least advantaged citizens in a liberal democracy has a relevant effect on exposing the latter to the risk of material domination. In this respect, this paper argues that even the most sophisticated and ambitious version of the so-called “insulation strategy” recently proposed by Julia Cagé is an insufficient remedy for the influence of money on politics. Moreover, it sustains that we have strong reasons to maintain a noncommittal view about the choice of ideal types of social systems. Being committed in principle to only one specific ideal social system restricts our political imagination and democratic autonomy of political societies. By contrast, this paper suggests coupling the noncommittal view with a “pluralistic distributive approach”, the main purpose of which is to focus on a set of distributive proposals concerning the most crucial areas of socioeconomic structures in liberal democracies.

À luz das mudanças socioeconômicas, políticas e tecnológicas que ocorreram desde o final do século passado, torna-se evidente, não apenas para os estudiosos, mas também para a opinião pública, que a esperança de que a democracia liberal continue a se expandir através de novas “ondas de democratização” é mal colocada, enquanto os fatores que enfraquecem as democracias liberais permanecerem intocados. É nossa crença que a análise desses fatores falhará sistematicamente a menos que uma suposição, até agora tomada como garantida pelo paradigma dominante, seja abandonada. Ou seja, que a teoria liberal é uma imagem perfeita de justiça e que o problema reside apenas na implementação e/ou na falta de atenção de uma opinião política teimosa e surda.

No presente artigo, refuto o argumento que uma concepção robusta de liberdades econômicas, que inclua a propriedade produtiva como um direito básico, implica necessariamente no enfraquecimento do compromisso institucional com as exigências distributivas. O propósito do artigo é, portanto, defender a tese exatamente oposta. Se, por um lado, há argumentos válidos para endossar uma concepção robusta de liberdade econômica que é necessária para o adequado desenvolvimento e exercício das “faculdades morais” da cidadania democrática; por outro lado, a mesma razão nos impõe categoricamente condenar desigualdades econômicas excessivas, a fim de que tanto o valor equitativo das liberdades políticas, como também das econômicas possam ser garantidos.

In this article, I refute the assumption that a thick conception of economic liberties, including the basic rights to productive property, necessarily entails a weakening commitment to distributive requirements. The aim of the article is precisely to defend the opposite thesis. If, on the one hand, we have valid arguments to endorse a thick conception of economic freedom that is necessary for the adequate development and exercise of the “moral powers” of democratic citizenship, on the other hand, the same reason compels us to condemn excessive economic inequalities, in order to guarantee the fair value of political as well as economic liberties.

The urgency of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 has intensified political commitments to a Green Transition. Yet, current strategies often overlook the structural links between carbon emissions and economic inequality. This paper argues that effective and fair climate action within developed liberal democracies must directly address economic disparities. I develop this claim through three main arguments. First, since the wealthiest 1% are disproportionately responsible for emissions, climate justice should shift its normative focus from the poor to the super-rich. While this resonates with emission limitarianism, its isolationist framework remains too narrow. Instead, I propose a non-monist integrationist approach that embeds climate justice within broader concerns of distributive justice. Second, extreme economic inequality erodes democratic institutions, fostering plutocratic tendencies, and also enables the super-rich to obstruct decarbonization through lobbying, litigation, and climate change denialism. Third, in developed liberal democracies, climate action centred solely on subsistence needs or poverty eradication lacks democratic legitimacy. If seen as worsening inequality, such policies face backlash. These concerns lead me to advocate for what I call the principle of proportionality, which requires that wealth and income inequalities be contained within well-defined limits. This principle offers a more viable and just framework for the Green Transition than competing distributive criteria.

Nowadays, many authors claim to belong to the critical theory tradition although their research focuses on a heterogeneity of topics and not all of them refer to the Frankfurt School. Within this debate, this paper shows how relations of domination could be considered the main object of investigation of critical theory. This could help us not only to delineate its methodology, but also, and mainly, to provide a compelling answer to some objections critical theory seems to face. Last but not least, it could additionally show that this object is strictly related to a certain idea of social justice. In this way, critical theory could remain consistent with its immanent or reconstructive methodology, and, in the same way, it could be better grounded in its emancipatory intention, thus avoiding falling into relativism. Obviously, we are aware that the critical theory tradition is concerned with a huge number of issues. It focuses on highly differentiated social phenomena, addressing its criticism to capitalism, ideologies, unjust socio-economic distribution, a certain idea of individual freedom, ways of conceiving identity, and many others. This paper, however, argues that it is possible to view how critical theory tackles all these topics from the same essential perspective: it criticizes eminently the relations of domination that these social phenomena reproduce. Moreover, by considering relations of domination as critical theory’s main object of investigation, we can draw a particular grammar of justice which is imminently relational or intersubjective.

Some scholars believe that only governments or those who uphold governmental policies can be human rights violators. Others argue that private individuals (with no governmental mandate and acting for themselves) are also able to violate human rights. The two positions have come to be known in the literature as the institutional interpretation and the interactional interpretation of human rights respectively. This paper critically analyzes an exemplary case: Thomas Pogge’s institutional conception of human rights as presented in World Poverty and Human Rights: Second Edition. This paper focuses on some of the negative consequences implicit in his approach. First of all, it shows that Pogge does not provide an adequate explanation of the reason why human rights should be conceived as claims on coercive social institutions and on those who uphold such institutions but not on single individuals, independently of their commitment to institutions. Secondly, it shows that official disrespect rather than violation as a criterion to evaluate the respecting of human rights is unsuccessful or at least insufficient. It sees in Pogge the same perspective mistake that infects Rawls’ conception of human rights, namely that of expanding unduly one of the functions human rights perform - establishing the limits of legitimate sovereignty - into their very essence. Therefore, this paper puts in question the way in which Pogge’s institutionalism mix the conception of human rights with the conception of (global) distributive justice. The conclusion to which the whole paper comes to is that proponents of the institutional interpretation (at least in the case of Pogge) misconstrue human rights because they conflate two philosophical agendas, that of human rights and that of global justice.

How rich should the 1% be? And, most importantly, when does the distance in economic resources between the richest citizens and ‘us’, the average citizenry, become a concern for justice? This volume explores how excessive economic inequality gives the best-off considerably more political influence than average citizens, thereby violating political equality. It argues that the gap between the best-off and the worst-off should not be reduced because it is good, but rather as an inescapable instrument to protect citizens from the risk of material domination. For this reason, it defends the ‘principle of proportionality’: economic inequality should not exceed a certain range or proportion to enable both the best-off and the worst-off to be co-authors of the legal, political, and socioeconomic rules that govern the ‘social’ relations in which they are involved. Further, the book discusses material domination and explains how money influences politics and what are the remedies for this phenomenon; how social justice should face and harmonise power, poverty, efficiency, individual merit, and economic liberties; and, most importantly, how to determine income and wealth limit ratios in a liberal democracy. A thoughtful investigation on the interdependencies of money and justice and their influence our socio-political systems, this volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of political theory, political philosophy, economics and development, economics theory and philosophy, and social policy.

This article argues about John Rawls' paradigm shift in contemporary political philosophy. In the article, this paradigm is defined as democratic insofar it claims, among other things, to leave enough room for democratic deliberations and citizens’ political autonomy. On this specific issue, Rawls and Habermas dialogue is still particularly fruitful. Both authors believe that contemporary political philosophy must be modest in some relevant theoretical and methodological aspects but they disagree on which of these aspects should be more or less modest. This article argues that when we look for the legitimate boundaries of the contemporary political philosophy, Rawls and Habermas projects should be seen as closely complementary to one another. On the one hand, the article partially agrees with Habermas’ objections to Rawls that political philosophy should not be too modest in providing orientations for the normative grounds of the political justification. On the other hand, against Habermas, the article remains on Rawls's side on the idea that political philosophy cannot be agnostic regarding the substantive and distributive issues of social justice.

Some scholars believe that only governments or those who uphold governmental policies can be human rights violators. Others argue that private individuals are also able to violate human rights. The two positions have come to be known in the literature as the institutional interpretation and the interactional interpretation of human rights respectively. This paper critically analyzes an exemplary case: Thomas Pogge’s institutional conception of human rights as presented in World Poverty and Human Rights: Second Edition. This paper focuses on some of the negative consequences implicit in his approach. First of all, it shows that Pogge does not provide an adequate explanation of the reason why human rights should be conceived as claims on coercive social institutions and on those who uphold such institutions but not on single individuals, independently of their commitment to institutions. Secondly, it shows that official disrespect rather than violation as a criterion to evaluate the respecting of human rights is unsuccessful or at least insufficient. It sees in Pogge the same perspective mistake that infects Rawls’ conception of human rights, namely that of expanding unduly one of the functions human rights perform - establishing the limits of legitimate sovereignty - into their very essence. Therefore, this paper puts in question the way in which Pogge’s institutionalism mix the conception of human rights with the conception of distributive justice. The conclusion to which the whole paper comes to is that proponents of the institutional interpretation misconstrue human rights because they conflate two philosophical agendas, that of human rights and that of global justice.

In the current debate on human rights, the political conception is attractive in its ability to try to find solutions to the central questions and problems, which the orthodox conception has difficulties in solving, because of its own nature it does not need a moral foundation that is independent of the recognition established by international law and practice. On the one hand, it is necessary to recognize that the current practice and the international doctrine consider human rights as tools addressed, mainly, to establish the limits of the legitimate sovereignty of the state, thus, recognizing the plausibility of the political conception. On the other hand, the article intends to show that this specific function, while important, should not exhaust all that human rights perform. Therefore, the political conception runs the serious risk of weakening the normative force of human rights and conflating two different agendas, that of human rights and that of global justice. To go through this argument, first of all, the article presents the contemporary genesis of the political conception of human rights based on the work of John Rawls. Secondly, it focuses on the reformulation given by Raz and Beitz’s approaches. Finally, in the third section, I criticize three main assumptions which ground the current paradigm of political conception of human rights.

This paper argues that the future of capabilities approach lies on the theoretical development of the democratic political structure. For this purpose, we take into account Martha Nussbaum’s late theoretical works. Firstly, we argue that the capability approach can be divided into two main models: the top down and the bottom up. Nussbaum, for example, endorses a top-down model, which it begins from an abstractive theory of partial justice and then draws the issue of institutional implementation. On the other hand, Amartya Sem advocates the bottom-up model, which starts from the immanent demands of justice from public sphere and then up to normative and abstract questions (like his “idea of justice”). In the second part of this paper, we present Nussbaum’s partial theory of justice, arguing that it is mainly composed by four issues: (a) the elaboration of the list of capabilities, (b) the process of normative evaluation, (c) arguments for stability, (d) the implementation of the model. About this last topic, we argue in the third part that the current theoretical advance of the capabilities approach lies on the issue of the democratic political structure. In other words, the future of capabilities approach depends on the interaction between its own theory and a theory of democracy. Finally, in the last section we provide a re-elaboration of Nussbaum’s threshold level of capabilities (the list) in order to make it more adherent with the democratic political structure.

The article argues that the possibility of an unlimited gap in income and wealth between the top and bottom segments of society is incompatible with a democratic commitment to political equality. The first section outlines why current distributive and relational approaches are unable to adequately address this problem. The second and third sections introduce the notion of material domination and argue that the only remedy against it is the containment of economic inequality within a certain proportion, expressed in terms of ratios between the material resources of the best-off and the worst-off. The fourth section spells out the constraints that any definition of these ratios should satisfy and shows, through a case study based on the contemporary United States, that an approximate, yet non-arbitrary definition is within reach. The fifth and final section rebuts some predictable objections to this approach.