Per una teoria politica della giustizia tra questioni di giustificazione e applicabilità

This paper aims to investigate the way in which a political theory of justice should respond to the endorsement of pluralism. It adopts a descriptive notion of pluralism as the recognition of the presence of a plurality of views of the world and values held by different agents as something relevant for political theory. After offering reasons in support of the necessity for a political theory of justice to take pluralism seriously, an argument is put forward for the characterisation of such a theory in minimal and procedural terms. However, taking issue with the straight correspondence identified by a number of scholars between pluralism and procedural justice, this paper contends that a direct correlation can only be established between pluralism and the need to define a minimal theory of justice, i.e. a theory that assumes as little as possible in terms of values and views of the world. Its procedural formulation is seen, instead, as a derivative consequence due to the limited predictive power of a theory when facing the situations with which it is expected to deal. Namely, given the heterogeneous nature of such situations, a political theory of justice seems to be unable to provide a trans-contextual characterisation of what a just state of affairs should consist of. It should, rather, base its conception of justice on the definition of procedural guidelines that are applicable across different contexts.

Emanuela Ceva, Per una teoria politica della giustizia tra questioni di giustificazione e applicabilità in "TEORIA POLITICA" 2/2007, pp 65-78, DOI: