This book articulates a participatory conception of deliberative democracy that takes the democratic ideal of self-government seriously. It aims to improve citizens' democratic control and vindicate the value of citizens' participation against conceptions that threaten to undermine it. The book critically analyzes deep pluralist, epistocratic, and lottocratic conceptions of democracy. Their defenders propose various institutional ''shortcuts'' to help solve problems of democratic governance such as overcoming disagreements, citizens' political ignorance, or poor-quality deliberation. However, all these shortcut proposals require citizens to (...) blindly defer to actors over whose decisions they cannot exercise control. Implementing such proposals would therefore undermine democracy. Moreover, it seems naive to assume that a community can reach better outcomes 'faster' if it bypasses the beliefs and attitudes of its citizens. Unfortunately, there are no 'shortcuts' to make a community better than its members. The only road to better outcomes is the long, participatory road that is taken when citizens forge a collective will by changing one another's hearts and minds. However difficult the process of justifying political decisions to one another may be, skipping it cannot get us any closer to the democratic ideal. Starting from this conviction, the book defends a conception of democracy ''without shortcuts''. This conception sheds new light on long-standing debates about the proper scope of public reason, the role of religion in politics, and the democratic legitimacy of judicial review. It also proposes new ways to unleash the democratic potential of institutional innovations such as deliberative minipublics. (shrink)

This essay focuses on recent proposals to confer decisional status upon deliberative minipublics such as citizen juries, Deliberative Polls, citizen’s assemblies, and so forth. Against such proposals, I argue that inserting deliberative minipublics into political decision-making processes would diminish the democratic legitimacy of the political system as a whole. This negative conclusion invites a question: which political uses of minipublics would yield genuinely democratic improvements? Drawing from a participatory conception of deliberative democracy, I propose several uses of minipublics that could (...) enhance the democratic legitimacy of political decision-making in current societies. (shrink)

This book is a major contribution to the understanding of Heidegger and a rare attempt to bridge the schism between traditions of analytic and Continental philosophy. Cristina Lafont applies the core methodology of analytic philosophy, language analysis, to Heidegger's work providing both a clearer exegesis and a powerful critique of his approach to the subject of language. In Part One, she explores the Heideggerean conception of language in depth. In Part Two, she draws on recent work from theorists of direct (...) reference (Putnam, Donnellan and Kripke inter alia) to reveal the limitations of Heidegger's views and to show how language shapes our understanding of the world without making learning impossible. The book first appeared in German but has been substantially revised for the English edition. (shrink)

In this article I analyze Rawls' and Habermas' accounts of the role of religion in political deliberations in the public sphere. After pointing at some difficulties involved in the unequal distribution of deliberative rights and duties among religious and secular citizens that follow from their proposals, I argue for a way to structure political deliberation in the public sphere that imposes the same deliberative obligations on all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular. These obligations derive from the ideal of mutual (...) accountability that is supposed to guide political deliberation in a deliberative democracy. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze the tension between realism and antirealism at the basis of Kantian constructivism. This tension generates a conflictive account of the source of the validity of social norms. On the one hand, the claim to moral objectivity characteristic of Kantian moral theories makes the validity of norms depend on realist assumptions concerning the existence of shared fundamental interests among all rational human beings. I illustrate this claim through a comparison of the approaches of Rawls, Habermas and (...) Scanlon. On the other hand, however, objections to moral realism motivate many Kantian constructivists to endorse the antirealist claim that reasonable agreement is the source of the validity of social norms. After analyzing the difficulties in the latter strategy, I try to show how a balance between the realist and antirealist elements of Kantian constructivism can be reached by drawing a sharper distinction between the justice and the legitimacy of social norms. (shrink)

To address the question posed in the title, I focus on Heidegger's 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 Heidegger's 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 Heidegger's intersubjectivist conception of language commits him to social externalism, while his conception of the ontological difference commits him to semantic internalism. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In this essay 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 towards 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. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyze the cosmopolitan project for a new international order that Habermas has articulated in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the project oscillates between two models. The first is a very ambitious model for a future international order geared to fulfill the peace and human rights goals of the UN Charter. The second is a minimalist model, in which the obligation to protect human rights by the international community is circumscribed to the negative duty (...) of preventing wars of aggression and massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. According to this model, any more ambitious goals should be left to a global domestic politics, which would have to come about through negotiated compromises among domesticated major powers at the transnational level. I defend the ambitious model by arguing that there is no basis for drawing a normatively significant distinction between massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts and those due to regulations of the global economic order. I conclude that the cosmopolitan goals of the Habermasian project can only be achieved if the principles of transnational justice recognized by the international community are ambitious enough to cover economic justice. (shrink)

In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom engages Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of interpretation in order to show that his inferentialist approach to understanding conceptual content can explain and underwrite the main theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics which he calls “the gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes”. In order to assess whether this claim is sound, I analyze the three types of philosophical interpretations that Brandom discusses: de re, de dicto and de traditione, and argue that they commit him to an “ecumenical historicism” (...) that is directly at odds with the hermeneutic approach. Although the variety of de re interpretation that Brandom denominates de traditione comes indeed very close to the Gadamerian approach, I conclude that if Brandomian scorekeepers were to adopt it, they could become Gadamerian hermeneuts, but once they did, they would not be able to go back to their scorekeeping practices as described by Brandom. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyze the cosmopolitan project for a new international order that Habermas has articulated in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the project oscillates between two models. The first is a very ambitious model for a future international order geared to fulfill the peace and human rights goals of the UN Charter. The second is a minimalist model, in which the obligation to protect human rights by the international community is circumscribed to the negative duty (...) of preventing wars of aggression and massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. According to this model, any more ambitious goals should be left to a global domestic politics, which would have to come about through negotiated compromises among domesticated major powers at the transnational level. I defend the ambitious model by arguing that there is no basis for drawing a normatively significant distinction between massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts and those due to regulations of the global economic order. I conclude that the cosmopolitan goals of the Habermasian project can only be achieved if the principles of transnational justice recognized by the international community are ambitious enough to cover economic justice. (shrink)

In a recent article Allan Buchanan and Robert Keohane defend the view that one of the necessary conditions for the legitimacy of global governance institutions such as the WTO and the IMF is that they respect basic human rights. I certainly agree that setting the minimal threshold of moral acceptability any lower would be entirely unreasonable. But, unfortunately, the view that global governance institutions have human rights obligations is far from uncontroversial. These institutions themselves go to great lengths to deny (...) such a claim. Their official stance finds strong normative support in the state-centric conception of human rights that dominates both normative debates about human rights and current human rights practice. In this article I challenge some of the normative assumptions behind the state-centric conception in order to defend a pluralist conception that ascribes human rights obligations not only to states but also to non-state actors such as global governance institutions. After briefly analyzing some of the proposals currently under discussion about how to legally entrench the obligation to respect human rights in those institutions, I will defend the feasibility of those proposals against the objection that their implementation is incompatible with the current state-system and thus it would require the creation of a world state. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

En este ensayo analizo algunas dificultades conceptuales asociadas a la exigencia de que las instituciones globales adquieran un grado mayor de legitimidad democrática. En ausencia de un Estado mundial, puede parecer inconsistente exigir que las instituciones globales sean responsables ante todos los que han de acatar sus decisiones y al mismo tiempo insistir en que los miembros de dichas instituciones, en tanto que representantes de sus respectivos Estados, mantengan las responsabilidades especiales que tienen con los ciudadanos de sus propios países. (...) Esta dificultad parece insuperable a la luz de la extendida aceptación de la concepción de los derechos humanos centrada en el Estado, según la cual los Estados, y sólo ellos, son los responsables principales de proteger los derechos de sus ciudadanos. Contra esta concepción, defiendo la plausibilidad de una concepción alternativa, pluralista de las obligaciones derivadas de los derechos humanos. Para ello argumento que, si se tiene en cuenta la distinción tripartita entre la obligación de respetar, proteger y realizar los derechos humanos, no hay ninguna dificultad conceptual en exigir que tanto los Estados como los actores no estatales se responsabilicen por sus respectivas obligaciones en materia de derechos humanos. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to criticize the reification of language present in Heidegger’s writings after the Kehre . The steps of the argument are as follows. First, it is argued that the specific features of Heidegger’s conception of language after the Kehre can be traced back to Heidegger’s conception of the ontological difference in Being and Time . The common element in both conceptions is the assumption that meaning determines reference (i.e. that the way entities are understood determines which (...) entities we can refer to). In the next step the implications of this assumption are shown through an analysis of Heidegger’s conception of designation in Being and Time and after the Kehre . Finally, this conception of designation is criticized with the help of the analysis of designation offered by the so-called theories of direct reference. Key Words: Donnellan • Heidegger • language • linguistic idealism • meaning • ontological difference • reference • referential/attributive distinction. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza el impacto del giro lingüístico en la transformación de la concepción kantiana de los juicios sintéticos a priori. Se centra para ello en dos concepciones contemporáneas de los mismos, a saber, el a priori hermenéutico de Heidegger y el a priori contextual de Putnam, y saca a relucir expresamente tanto sus rasgos similares como sus importantes diferencias: mientras que la concepción heideggeriana mantiene el idealismo transcendental de Kant a través de la suposición hermenéutica de que el significado (...) determina la referencia, la concepción de Putnam rompe por completo con la teoría kantiana de los juicios sintéticos a priori, según la cual éstos no pueden ser modificados por la sola experiencia, al tiempo que rechaza la suposición kantiana de que los juicios sintéticos a priori y aposteriori son dos clases permanentes de juicios. En contraste con Heidegger, Putnam es por eso capaz de mostrar que los juicios sintéticos apriori son modificables bajo condiciones especiales. (shrink)

En este artículo se argumenta contra la interpretación metaética del kantianismo moral como una forma de constructivismo o antirealismo moral. Dado que los kantianos no comparten el expresivismo característico del antirealismo moral estándar, el constructivismo kantiano parece llevar a una posición inherentemente inestable que sólo puede desarrollarse o bien en un realismo consistente con el cognitivismo moral kantiano o en un decidido antirealismo moral. Tomando la ética del discurso de Habermas como ejemplo, aquí se contrasta una interpretación realista con una (...) interpretación antirealista del principio moral de universalización con la intención de mostrar que sólo la primera es compatible con el cognitivismo moral característico de las éticas kantianas, mientras que la segunda lleva inevitablemente a un planteamiento decisionista y, con ello, a un claro relativismo moral. (shrink)

Any attempt to elucidate the interconnections between phenomenology and critical theory must at some point confront the question of what role Heidegger's philosophy plays in that equation. The historical or biographical side of the question is interesting in its own right and can be philosophically illuminating.1 My focus here, however, will be systematic. In particular, I would like to analyze the similarities and differences between Heidegger's hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology in Being and Time and Habermas's transformation of critical theory in (...) his Theory of Communicative Action. As a way of narrowing my focus, I will take as a guide the.. (shrink)

En este artículo se intenta mostrar cómo es posible defender un punto de vista universalista y cognítivista en cuestiones morales sin tener que negar el pluralismo ético que caracteriza a las sociedades modernas. Para ello se analiza una dificultad que ha sido planteada recientemente a la ética del discurso de Habermas en relación con la posibilidad de compaginar ambas cosas. Si defender un universalismo moral implica defender lo que Habermas denomina "la premisa de una respuesta correcta» en relación con las (...) cuestiones morales, tal universalismo tiene que suponer, pues, que sólo puede haber una interpretación correcta de dichas cuestiones; si esto es así, el universalismo moral, en realidad, excluye el pluralismo como alternativa racional al acuerdo en cuestiones prácticas. Dicha dificultad puede evitarse, sin embargo, si se muestra que «la premisa de una respuesta correcta» no implica, en realidad, «la premisa de una única interpretación correcta». (shrink)

In this essay, I address several questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to the special issue on my book Democracy without Shortcuts. In particular, I address some implications of my critique of deep pluralism; distinguish between three senses of ‘blind deference’: political, reflective, and informational; draw a critical parallelism between the populist conception of representation as embodiment and the conception of ‘citizen-representatives’ often ascribed to participants in deliberative minipublics; defend the democratic attractiveness of participatory uses over empowered uses (...) of deliberative minipublics; clarify why accepting public reason constraints does not imply limiting deliberation to questions about constitutional rights, and argue that overcoming a state-centric conception of democracy does not require replacing the ‘all subjected’ principle with the ‘all affected’ principle. (shrink)

This book is one of the most comprehensive and detailed commentaries on both divisions of Heidegger’s Being and Time available in English. The chapters on division 1 were originally published in 1964 under the title Heidegger’s Philosophy: A Guide to His Basic Thought. The new edition prepared by John Llewelyn includes Magda King’s commentaries on division 2 of Being and Time, which are now published for the first time posthumously. The renderings of Heidegger’s German terms have also been revised to (...) correspond to Joan Stambaugh’s new translation of Being and Time. In its new shape, this book is an excellent guide through Heidegger’s master work. (shrink)

In this essay, I address some questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to this special issue on my book ‘Democracy without Shortcuts’. First, I clarify different aspects of my cri...

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. (shrink)