Search results for "Rawl"

Comparative vs. Transcendental Approaches to Justice: A Misleading Dichotomy in Sen’s The Idea of Justice

2012

In this paper I try to put under scrutiny the distinction offered by A. Sen between transcendental and comparative theories of justice, and its application to Rawls’ doctrine. After presenting Sen’s arguments, I will put forward three theses. First, Sen offers a limited portrait of Rawls’ doctrine. This limitation is the result of a rhetorical strategy that depicts Rawlsian doctrine as more “transcendental” than it really is. Although Sen presents a large number of quotations in order to validate his interpretation, it is possible to offer a different, less transcendental, interpretation of Rawls’ doctrine. Secondly, the dichotomy between transcendental and comparative approaches to questio…

Desobediencia civil y participación política. Unas cuestiones abiertas para las democracias constitucionales (y la teoría del derecho)

2015

In this article I try to show some problems of the interpretation of civil disobedience as a practice that aims to maintain democratic principles against discriminative legal patterns or oligarchic forces. I will present two doctrines, the Rawlsian (followed by Habermas) and the one proposed recently by supporters of a radical constitutional change through the exercise of “constituent power”. The Rawlsian account a) offers a too stringent model of justification of this type of practice and b) does not recognize the plurality of subjects to which civil disobedience appeal. The supporters of radical constitutional change fall into a form of heterogony of ends. They reject liberal accounts of …

Overlapping consensus e cross-cultural approach: Rawls e An-Na'im, due mondi a confronto

2003

Basic structure and tax havens

2012

In this paper I argue that Rawlsian Law of People (LP) is much more useful to the debate on international distributive justice than it is commonly assumed by many leading political philosophers (Pogge, Nussbaum, Sen, Beitz, Singer). I will show: 1) that these criticisms are misleading, insofar as they do not take the concept of basic structure seriously, and they reduce LP to an instance of ethical statism or of acritical acceptance of cultural pluralism; 2) that the basic domestic structures, and the principles that govern them, depend on the law of peoples and its principles as well. Therefore it is not true that each basic structure is independent of what occurs in the international fiel…

¿Qué podemos pedir a una teoría de la justicia? Algunas consideraciones acerca de un debate entre Amartya Sen y John Rawls

2010

In this paper I try to revise Sen’s thesis about the «transcendental» nature of Rawls’ theory of justice. According to Sen transcendental theories of justice are unnecessary. What we aim at is to justify a series of comparative judgements about two or more states of affairs.We do not strive, unlike Rawls, to form a complete system of moral principles that backs an «ideal just society». I try to show that Sen’s «comparative» account is weak. First of all, Sen does not offer a fair interpretation of Rawls’ theory. In particular, he is wrong when he depicts Rawls’ justice as fairness as a complete and transcendental moral doctrine. Secondly, Sen overlooks the fact that in order to justify comp…

El declive de la ética de las capacidades

2013

Capability approach is one of the most important contributions of contemporary political philosophy to the subject of international distributive justice and more generally to the implementation of development policies. In this paper I aim to shed light on some pitfalls of the last production of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Sen’s last book “The idea of justice” introduced his theory as a “comparative” approach to issues of justice, while rejecting “transcendental” approaches such as Rawls’one. I will show how this dichotomy between comparative and transcendental approach is mistaken, since it rests on wrong assumptions on what we can require from a theory of justice. As far as Nussbaum i…

Rawls ed An-Na’im in dialogo. Reciprocità, Islam e Costituzionalismo

2018

Constitutionalism and Islam are the theoretical framework of An- Na’im’ Islamic reformation. This proposal is possible on the herme- neutic role of the naskh for a new interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunna, based on the principle of reciprocity. Is the An-Na’im’s notion of civic reason a ‘friendly amendment’ to Rawls’idea of public reason? Making sense of the reciprocity and the reasonable as normative and moral ideal in the two thinkers, through the necessary dimension of the constitutionalism, can overcome their differences.

Aspects and problems of changing economic utilization of the land in Italy and the corresponding soil consumption

2013

The study moves from the observation that, in the last fifty years (1961-2010) the territory of our country, like those of other countries with advanced economies, has undergone extensive economic processes of change in the use of land, mostly due to a strong reduction of Agricultural Area Use (AAU), whose consistency - on the basis of official statistics (National Statistics Institute) and, in particular, the results of the General Census of Agriculture - is estimated at around 7,8 million hectares, from 20, 7 million hectares in 1961 to 12,9 million in 2010. It should be noted in fact that the intensity of the processes of reduction of the UAA was much greater in the first three decades, …

Fractal geometry for measuring and modelling urban patterns

2007

Urban growth generates nowadays patterns, which look rather irregular. Planning policy regrets the lack of compactness and density of these agglomerations, but controlling urban sprawl turns out to be difficult. Obviously a new type of spatial organisation emerges, which is rather the result of a self-organisation process to which a high number of social agents contribute. In the present contribution we focus on the use of fractal geometry which turned out to be a powerful instrument for describing the morphology of these patterns. After an introduction about the context of research, fractal models are presented, which serve as reference models for better understanding the spatial organisat…

Density and biomass of smelt (Osmerus eperlanus) in five Finnish lakes

2005

Abstract Hydro-acoustic stock assessment and exploratory sampling with small mesh-sized trawls and seines have sometimes suggested that the importance of smelt (Osmerus eperlanus) in pelagic fish communities might be greater than sampling from commercial fishery and gillnetting indicate. We studied the proportion of smelt in the total fish density (fish ha−1) and biomass (kg ha−1) of pelagic fish with echo sounding and trawling in five southern boreal lakes. Fish density varied between 460 and 2000 fish ha−1 in the study lakes. Smelt and vendace (Coregonus albula) accounted for more than 95% of the exploratory trawl-catches. The total fish biomass in the study areas varied between 3 and 13 …