Cristina Lafont

Procedural justice?: Implications of the Rawls-Habermas debate for discourse ethics

In this paper I focus on the discussion between Rawls and Habermas on procedural justice. I use Rawls’s distinction between pure, perfect, and imperfect procedural justice to distinguish three possible readings of discourse ethics. Then I argue, against Habermas’s own recent claims, that only an interpretation of discourse ethics as imperfect procedural justice can make compatible its professed cognitivism with its proceduralism. Thus discourse ethics cannot be understood as a purely procedural account of the notion of justice. Finally I draw the different consequences that follow from this reading.

Accountability and global governance: challenging the state-centric conception of human rights

In this paper I analyze some conceptual difficulties associated with the demand that global institutions be made more democratically accountable. In the absence of a world state, it may seem inconsistent to insist that global institutions be accountable to all those subject to their decisions while also insisting that the members of these institutions, as representatives of states, simultaneously remain accountable to the citizens of their own countries for the special responsibilities they have toward them. This difficulty seems insurmountable in light of the widespread acceptance of a state-centric conception of human rights, according to which states and only states bear primary responsibility for the protection of their citizens’ rights. Against this conception, I argue that in light of the current structures of global governance the monistic ascription of human rights obligations to states is no longer plausible. Under current conditions, states are bound to fail in their ability to protect the human rights of their citizens whenever potential violations either stem from transnational regulations or are perpetrated by non-state actors. In order to show the plausibility of an alternative, pluralist conception of human rights obligations I turn to the current debate among scholars of international law regarding the human rights obligations of non-state actors. I document the various ways in which these obligations could be legally entrenched in global financial institutions such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. These examples indicate feasible methods for strengthening the democratic accountability of these institutions while also respecting the accountability that participating member states owe to their own citizens. I conclude that, once the distinctions between the obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights are taken into account, no conceptual difficulty remains in holding states and non-state actors accountable for their respective human rights obligations.

Was Heidegger an Externalist

To address the question posed in the title, I focus on Heideggers conception of linguistic communication developed in the sections on Rede and Gerede of Being and Time. On the basis of a detailed analysis of these sections I argue that Heidegger was a social externalist but semantic internalist. To make this claim, however, I first need to clarify some key points that have led critics to assume Heideggers commitment to social externalism automatically commits him to semantic externalism regarding concept use. I begin by explaining the independence of those positions, arguing that social externalism answers the question of whose concepts in a linguistic community are properly individuated, whereas semantic externalism makes a claim about what it takes for concepts to be properly individuated. Once these issues are distinguished, it is possible to see that Heideggers intersubjectivist conception of language commits him to social externalism, while his conception of the ontological difference commits him to semantic internalism.

Human Rights, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect

In 2005 the UN General Assembly unanimously endorsed the doctrine of a Responsibility-to-Protect (R2P) human rights. This initiated a series of debates about whether two fundamental principles of international law, international human rights protections and state sovereignty, could still be thought of as compatible with one another. These debates suggest that the values of human rights and self-determination are on a collision course: if one values the international protection of human rights then one must accept that this may undermine the self-determination and sovereign equality of states, and if one values popular sovereignty and self-determination then one must accept that this may undermine the international protection of human rights. I defend the view that human rights and sovereignty are not antithetical values, but must be seen as mutually reinforcing principles of international law. On this basis I offer an account of the international community’s Responsibility to Protect human rights that is more demanding than the currently acknowledged account. I also show how my more ambitious account does not have to be purchased at the price of undermining the sovereign equality of states.

Can democracy go global

In his Democracy across borders, Bohman articulates an ambitious political proposal for a future international order. Perhaps its most salient feature is the promise of global democracy without a world government. Global democracy is usually associated with the ideal of a world community unified under a set of global democratic institutions. Fear of the totalitarian consequences that such a concentration of power would generate often leads even the staunchest cosmopolitans to limit their democratic aspirations to the national level and merely hope for the progressive implementation of the rule of law at the global level. In his book, Bohman tries to break with the widespread assumption that an increase in democratization across national borders must be purchased at the price of a concentration of power that dangerously increases the potential for political domination. According to Bohman, this assumption is rooted in a narrow understanding of the democratic ideal - an understanding that needs to be replaced by a more complex one. (Published: 5 February 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pp. 13-19. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i1.4850

Realismus und Konstruktivismus in der kantianischen Moralphilosophie - das Beispiel der Diskursethik Habermas und Kant

Schaut man sich die gegenwärtigen Diskussionen in der Metaethik an, so kann man als deren auffälligstes Merkmal eine Unmenge an Realismen und Antirealismen feststellen: Bekennende moralische Realisten und Antirealisten beteiligen sich ebenso an diesen Debatten wie unzählige Quasirealisten, interne Realisten usw., die sich um eine gelungene Mischung dieser Zutaten bemühen. Betrachtet man die Debatten allerdings aus etwas größerem Abstand, dann erkennt man, dass es im Grunde genommen dabei um eine Neuzuordnung der Positionen geht, die sich seit jeher in moralphilosophischen Diskussionen zwischen dem empiristischen und dem rationalistischen Zweig der Ethik finden (wobei, in den angesprochenen Begriffen gesprochen, Erstere den Antirealismus und Letztere den Realismus vertreten). So intensiv diese Debatten auch sein mögen, so scheint es doch, dass Ansätze, die an Kants Moralphilosophie anknüpfen, davon weitgehend unberührt bleiben. Dementsprechend finden sich bislang kaum nennenswerte Beiträge zu diesen Debatten von Seiten kantianischer Moralphilosophen. Ein Grund für diese eher unbeteiligte Haltung mag darin liegen, dass es völlig außer Frage zu stehen scheint, dass es sich bei kantianischen Ansätzen um eine Unterart des Antirealismus bzw. Konstruktivismus handelt. Dieser Eindruck wird noch dadurch verstärkt, dass die beiden wichtigsten Vertreter kantianischer Positionen in der praktischen Philosophie der Gegenwart, Habermas und Rawls, ihre eigenen Moraltheorien als antirealistisch oder konstruktivistisch einstufen. Dieser Einschätzung steht allerdings entgegen, dass weder Kant noch Rawls oder Habermas die für antirealistische Positionen in der Moralphilosophie charakteristischen, expressivistischen Grundannahmen teilen, das heißt die Ansicht, dass wir beim Fällen moralischer Urteile noch nicht einmal vorgeben, Behauptungen über das zu machen, was objektiv richtig oder falsch ist, sondern lediglich unseren nonkognitiven Haltungen Ausdruck verleihen. Kantianer sind eben keine moralphilosophischen Expressivisten, sondern Kognitivisten. Deshalb bestehen sie ausdrücklich auf der objektiven Geltung moralischer Urteile. Betrachtet man den Expressivismus als zentrales Charakteristikum antirealistischer Positionen, so müsste man also die kantianische Moralphilosophie zumindest als anomalen Antirealismus einstufen.

Should We Take the Human Out of Human Rights? Human Dignity in a Corporate World

In recent years philosophical debates on human rights have focused upon the contrast between humanist and political conceptions of human rights. Defenders of the humanist conception take human rights to be those rights that we have solely in virtue of being human. By contrast, defenders of the political conception aim to offer an account of human rights practice without any recourse to notions such as human dignity, personhood, etc. They take human rights to be those rights that we have in virtue of being subject to political authority. In this essay, I show some of the problematic implications of endorsing this aspect of the political conception. After analyzing some key functions that the concept of human dignity plays in human rights practice, I focus on the gradual extension of legal human rights to corporations. I analyze the negative effects that the distinctive functions of human rights norms can have upon the human rights of natural persons once corporations are recognized as legal persons bearing human rights. Turning to human rights jurisprudence I then explore the normative resources that the concept of human dignity has to offer in order to prevent such negative effects and which are unavailable to a conception of human rights that disregards the humanist core of human rights practice.

The Cunning of Law Remarks on Brunkhorst’s Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions

This article provides an overview and critical analysis of Brunkhorst’s forthcoming book Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions. First, I briefly analyze the specific way in which Brunkhorst’s innovative approach to social evolution combines the normative and functionalist perspectives in order to reconstruct the four great legal revolutions that led to the formation of modern law. In the second step, I raise some critical concerns about the basic conceptual and methodological assumptions behind Brunkhorst’s reconstruction: a concern regarding its Eurocentrism, a concern about the methodological distinction between evolutionary and revolutionary change – particularly the question of where to situate counterrevolutionary ideological battles and developments and a concern about the systematic role of religion and religious ideas in his reconstruction.

Citizens in robes: The place of religion in constitutional democracies

The normative place of religion in liberal democracies is as contested as ever. This contestation produces understandable fears that liberal democratic institutions may ultimately be incompatible with religious forms of life. If this is so, if there is genuinely no hope that secular and religious citizens can equally take ownership over and identify with these institutions, then the future of democracy within pluralist societies seems seriously threatened. These fears commonly arise in debates concerning the liberal criterion of democratic legitimacy, according to which citizens ought to justify the imposition of coercive policies on each other with reasons that everyone can reasonably accept. Since religious reasons are not generally acceptable to secular citizens and citizens of different faiths, endorsing this criterion entails accepting the claim that, for the purposes of political justification, public reasons should take priority over religious considerations. This claim has been vigorously criticized on two grounds. First, critics resist such a claim on the skeptical grounds that there is simply no such thing as public reasons, that is, a subset of reasons that all citizens can reasonably accept as having priority for justifying coercive policies. Second, critics contest the claim on the normative grounds that an unequal treatment of religious reasons for the purposes of political justification is unfair to religious citizens and is therefore incompatible with the core values of a liberal democracy. Against both lines of criticism, I articulate a defense of the priority of public reasons that is exclusively based on the normative commitments constitutive of liberal democratic institutions and which can therefore be reflectively endorsed by all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular.

Review essay: Whose poor are the global poor? Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008)

When Ralph Waldo Emerson was reminded of the obligation to help the poor, he rejected it with his famous rhetorical question ‘Are they my poor?’1 Pogge’s book World Poverty and Human Rights can be seen as a bold and compelling attempt to show contemporary Emersonians that the answer to that question, however astonishing it may seem, is actually ‘yes’. Most work in moral philosophy done in the past, if it focused on the obligations to the distant poor at all, shared Emerson’s assumption that the answer to this question is ‘no’. Since we obviously lack any special ties (e.g. of family or nationality) to the distant poor and are otherwise entirely unrelated to them, they cannot be ‘our’ poor. Nevertheless, many authors have rejected the Emersonian conclusion that we lack obligations toward distant strangers. Such authors have argued for a positive duty to help those in need, even if they do not fall within one’s sphere of special responsibility, at least when one can do so at little cost or risk to oneself.2 The greatest achievement of Pogge’s book is to have challenged the Emersonian assumption, widely shared among citizens of the affluent countries, that the global poor are not ‘our’ poor. This achievement is all the more remarkable in light of the sparse normative means employed. The only thing needed at the normative level is an assumption that no minimally reasonable morality can deny, namely, that there is a strictly negative duty, which applies to all human beings, to refrain from harming innocent people, regardless of whether they are close to us or strangers. This provides a straightforward way