Claudio Corradetti

Public Deliberation and the role of stakeholders as a new frontier in the governance of science: the British Columbia Biobank Deliberation and the DePGx Project

With the ever rapid development of scientific and technological research in the 19th century, the power growth of scientific institutions and their specific influence have expanded incredibly due to the results they have achieved in several research areas.

The multiple identities of critical theory: A Hydra or a Proteus?

I attended the Prague conference in May 2007 for the first time, after an invitation from Alessandro Ferrara, who was at that moment my PhD supervisor at LUISS University, Rome. I delivered a paper on the contemporary reception of the Kantian ‘democratic peace’ argument, a quite sensitive topic in the years of G. W. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was on that occasion that Bill Scheuerman ‘tortured’ me with several challenging comments. Since then, I have maintained with him a constant exchange. Coming originally from the field of linguistics, to me Prague was the place of the diaspora of Russian linguists of the caliber of Roman Jackobson and Nicolai Trubetzkoy, the founders of the Prague School of Phonology. I feared the pressure of this legacy. Contrary to my expectations, when I arrived at Villa Lanna I was welcomed by senior participants with informal talks and genuine interest in my work. I felt I was becoming part of a truly open-minded community. I was not used to such care and attention; a sense of excitement started arising, one comparable with the discovery of a new worlddimension. Yet, it did not take too long to realize that it was not just ‘one’ world-dimension but several, tied together under the aegis of ‘critical theory’. My initial reaction was to try to understand what it meant in such a context to be affiliated to a prominent, but perhaps timely and geographically constrained, intellectual experience as it was with the Frankfurt School. I could not easily grasp the sense of a collective self-perception of the Prague participants as members of such tradition. Indeed, there seemed not to be any single ‘master’ as there was in the Athenian Peripatos or in the Stoa but a number of differently oriented sensibilities replicated somehow by the Prague ‘board of directors’. Yet, not much of a sense of flaunted faithfulness to the ‘pure origin’ of a founding moment emerged. It appeared, rather, as

Constructivism in Cosmopolitan Law: Kant's Right to Visit

Kant is regarded as one of the most influential cosmopolitan thinkers. Indeed his legacy still influences the contemporary legal and philosophical debate on this issue. But what is the Kantian conception of cosmopolitan law? In which terms does it arise out of his notion of a ‘right to visit’? How does it contribute to the construction of a ‘cosmopolitan constitution’? In this article the view is advanced that Kant was a legal constructivist. The argument assumes also that within Kant’s view of an ‘original community of interaction’, the justification of a cosmopolitan notion of authority allows exercises of freedom under a general scheme of right. Kant’s ‘cosmopolitan constitution’ depends therefore upon such rationale, as well as on the jurisdictional link that the right to visit determines in allowing individuals with the possibility to have a ‘place on earth’.

Judicial Cosmopolitan Authority

ABSTRACT In this article, I conceptualise the notion of cosmopolitan authority as a form of legitimate exercise of judicial power. I take as my starting point Raz’s paradox of autonomy versus authority and consider that its solution depends on the formulation of a ‘cosmopolitan justification condition’. Next, I consider how this standard is reflected in recent judicial practice and conclude that ‘judicial cosmopolitan authority’ is both a theoretically desirable and practically feasible ideal. Finally, I examine instances of judicial cosmopolitan authority against the backdrop of the construction of global constitutional trajectories and highlight the progressive consolidation of the notion of ‘cosmopolitan constitutionalism’. I submit that this is the result of ‘transitional’ progressions and approximations, something different from the idea of ‘constitutional moments’ or ‘constitutional revolutions’.

Invited Editorial: Patient centric initiatives (PCIs) - a shift in the governance of science: Lessons from the biobanks world

Patient centric initiatives (PCIs) - a shift in the governance of science : Lessons from the biobanks world

Philosophical Issues in Transitional Justice Theory: a (Provisional) Balance

Transitional justice is becoming more and more an interdisciplinary field of study with interesting developments, not only in the assessment of a wide number of case studies, but also in the evaluation of increasingly more articulated theoretical problems. Undoubtedly, a robust collection of literature has now accumulated also on the more theoretically-oriented side. The present essay, far from aiming at an exhaustive reconstruction of the existing literature, is structured around some conceptual issues that consider the convergence of philosophical, legal and political aspects of transitional phenomena.

What does cultural difference require of human rights

Introduction The contemporary right to freedom of thought together with all its further declinations into freedom of speech, religion, conscience and expression had one of its earliest historical recognitions at the end of the Wars of Religion with the Edict of Nantes (1598). In several respects one can say that the right to freedom of thought is virtually “co-original” with the end of the Wars of Religion. Following this thought further, one might think that human rights define the boundaries of our social coexistence and are inextricably connected to the “fact” of cultural pluralism. By pursuing a critical - genealogical approach, I will first investigate the historical context within which the concept of human rights originated and then proceed to clarify the normative political significance of the notion of cultural diversity and pluralism. Pluralism is essential to the structure of the problem of justice within modern democracies. For example, it leads John Rawls in Political Liberalism (1993) to argue for a conception of political stability constructed on the basis of an overlapping consensus among “reasonable comprehensive doctrines.” Drawing on this Rawlsian line of thought, I will attempt to clarify the notion of overlapping consensus, asking whether it can be taken as an empirical fact or as a fact of political reason and whether it is sufficient to political stability and what all this means for human rights and cultural pluralism.

Can Human Rights Be Exported? On the Very Idea of Human Rights Transplantability

In order to formulate an answer to the question of human rights transplantability, it is essential to refer, first, to the previously argued thesis for the idea of a conceptuallegal status of human rights, and then to provide an understanding of the notion of transplantability itself. These points can be validly argued only if a general precondition is first satisfied: general comparability among systems of rights. Indeed, it is only if the possibility of general comparability among legal systems can be admitted that might arise the moral and political obligation to expand, through legal transplantability, the system of protected liberties and fundamental rights. I will consider three possible approaches to law which respond in different ways to the problem of transplantability: the first considers law as an autonomous domain and it represents the best candidate for a pure theory of legal transplants; the second conceives of law as a domain strictly embedded into and dependent upon society, thus rejecting any legitimate form of legal transplantability; finally, the third model represents an intermediate paradigm in between autonomy and autochthony, conceiving of the possibility of legal transplants as an option subordinated to certain specific constraints.

'Society in Science': The DePGx Project and the Democratization of Health Policy Strategies through Public Deliberation

Health policy strategies have been largely administered by cabinet Ministries and their offices. Almost exclusively, experts councils have underestimated the spectrum of considered opinions and advice coming from those sectors of civil society primarily involved in receiving health care service provisions. In the following essay, it will be addressed the case of public involvement of groups of interest in the formulation of policy guidelines for pharmacogenomic research and clinical therapy. Pharmacogenomics is a new and promising field of pharmacological research seeking to optimize the correlation between gene expression and treatment’s efficacy. While “pharmacogenomics” refers to the genome in its entirety, “pharmacogenetics” regards the specific interaction to drugs by single genes. In both cases, it is sought an improvement in efficiency for the new experimented drugs. Connected to this new research area, are several ethical concerns. Accordingly, as it will be made clear from the presentation of the deliberative outcomes, it will follow that any legitimate public health policy will have to consider those reasonable concerns emerging from “deliberative publics”.

Patientcentricity: An Editorial

Abstract On 12 March 2009 Time dedicated an entire issue indicating the top ten world-changing ideas for the next future and among these a special attention was dedicated to biobanks. The article asks a very important and challenging question: are there benefits that can be reasonably expected from very costly biomaterial storage and — if yes — which kind of benefits are these? What is insisted upon is the identification of the following burning ethical issue: privacy and security of data.The need of deepening these social and ethical aspects related to the biobank enterprise lead to the organization of the conference on “patientcentricity”. The conference took place in Rome on 28-29 September 2011 and it was organized by the Center of Biomedicine of the European Academy of Bolzano thanks to the financial support of the Italian Ministry of University and Research.This special issue introduces that conference, and this editorial introduces our motivations for this work.The wish and hope of the guest editors is that such discussions will contribute to opening new research and policy agendas by addressing new challenges and helping out in thinking new solutions.