POLITICAL JUSTIFICATION AND THE NORMATIVE FACT OF DISAGREEMENT

This dissertation is about disagreement. In particular, it focuses on the problem of how disagreement is to be dealt within the context of liberal democratic societies. The perspective from which this issue is tackled is that of normative political philosophy and it regards both how disagreement should be conceptualized in such context, but also how citizens should behave in the discussion of norms and policies upon which they deeply disagree. In particular, this work focuses on disagreements about ethical issues, which are widespread and pervasive in contemporary democracies. Since such disagreements represent an important portion of political debates and may sometimes constitute inception for collisions and violent episodes, the scope of this work is relevant with regards to the reality of current debates in democratic societies. However, understanding the problem of political philosophy is important also at the level of theoretical research. Indeed, that of disagreement among citizens who are to live together in the same society represents one of the most long-standing issues in political philosophy, having its roots in those social contract theories defended by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Moreover, starting with the publication of John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, this issue has gained new and tremendous interest in contemporary debates of normative political philosophy. In particular, among liberal political theorists, the mainstream position has at its core the concept of public justification, namely the idea that political authority can be considered legitimate only insofar as the reasons given for political action can be reasonably accepted by those subjected to it. In this work, I seek to critically evaluate the public justification approach and to highlight some tensions within its theoretical project, which I find unsatisfying in its lack of attention with respect to the phenomenon of disagreement. I strenuously believe that in order to address the questions of how disagreement should be treated within the political context of a democratic society, a deep inquiry into the nature of disagreement itself is necessary. Only when it is clear what a disagreement is, it is possible to find means to deal with it. In this sense, I do not provide answers to particular disputes, or settle some disagreements by favouring certain positions over others. Rather, I attempt to provide theoretical tools to comprehend and treat those very disputes in the political context. The hypothesis from which this work begins is the idea that the dominant, mainstream theories of justificatory liberalism are unsatisfying and should be rejected because of their detrimental treatment of disagreement. In particular, I argue that their method in tackling the issue of how individuals holding different views and beliefs can live together in a stable and harmonious society is unpersuasive. Seeking a practical solution and rejecting a philosophical approach to the problem, justificatory liberals simply miss the point about disagreement. From this hypothesis, I draw the thesis that in order to treat disagreements in democratic societies, it is necessary to understand what a disagreement fundamentally consists in. Only with a convincing account of the phenomenon of disagreement, it is possible to identify its normative implications. Finally, to achieve these results, I propose a methodological approach defending metaethics as a workable tool apt to explain and account for certain normative phenomena. Chapters 1-3 are methodological and are concerned with metaphilosophical questions about how the problem of disagreement should be tackled from the perspective of political philosophy. In the first two chapters, I critically evaluate the two most prominent accounts of justificatory liberalism and reject them. In chapter three, I present and defend my methodological approach by showing the importance of metaethical understanding for normative political philosophy. Chapter 4, is devoted to clarify what a disagreement actually is and explain its nature. Chapters 5-6 are the normative ones and focus on how citizens should respond to disagreement in the context of democratic societies and what principles of deliberation they should abide to.