THE MULTIFACETEDNESS OF REASONABLENESS IN LEGAL AND IN POLITICAL THEORY

We use to tackle political, ethical or legal issues separately. Present problems of liberal democracy and confrontation with authoritarian regimes are considered as political problems. In this vein the ‘fragility of democracies’ (Issacharoff 2015), especially with regard to the internal challenge coming from populist parties, is also taken as a political problem. In a partially different note the contemporary environmental crisis, of which ‘global climate change’ is the most visible phenomenon, is both a political and an ethical problem because governments alone appear unable to tackle its multiple facets without collaboration by individual citizens. There is increasing—but still inadequate—awareness that the style of life of consumeristic society determines a heavy impact on the environment. This point hints towards the main ethical problem of contemporary societies, that of a lack of orientation in ethical conduct. Even though a liberal society rejects all paternalistic or authoritarian prescriptions about how to live, general, vague criteria of ethical orientation would be helpful for many citizens—as some liberal perfectionists have tried to show (Raz 1986; Galston 1991; Sher 1997). Finally, all ethical and political issues meet in legal adjudication as the ‘compensation chamber’ in which conflicts of value must find solutions, though provisional and revisable. The legal arena, rather than violence, is the space in which conflicting values are argued for from perspectives that sometimes may come close, while other times remain at a distance, searching for reasonable solutions. All these issues belong to different branches of practical philosophy and are discussed by different categories of scholars: political and moral philosophers, legal and environmental theorists, just to name the main groups. Generally, there are points of connexion and overlapping among these groups of theorists. Sometimes we find works that are impactful on all debates, as it was the case of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). This masterwork has been studied and discussed by political, moral and legal scholars alike. It has also contributed to the debate on the environmental crisis, though to a minor extent. In the pages that follow one of my main purposes is that of taking a number of hints from Rawls’s contributions—also in Political Liberalism (1993)—addressing political, ethical, legal and environmental problems that have developed into directions hardly foreseeable in 1971 and 1993. What I believe to be most specific in the following chapters is the character of unitariness that connects my reflections on the already mentioned issues. ‘Reasonableness’ is the concept to which I shall appeal to show how the practical domain requires a more unitary view than what is usually conceded. It may be criticised as a vague and empty word, but I firmly believe that reasonableness, rather than being a buzzword, is a central concept of our society and the variety of its descriptive uses hints towards a normative core that may be helpful in all the contexts I have already mentioned. The overarching purposes of my reflections can be synthetised as follows: (1) by rejecting liberal scepticism, we can define to some extent normative criteria to live well together; (2) these criteria belong more to the domain of human flourishing than to that of justice; (3) these criteria constitute a developmental proposal that is continuous between ethics and politics, therefore they connect the way we live our individual lives to the way we arrange politically our living together and the domain of the ‘ethics of virtues’ has been called on throughout all chapters to spell out what counts for us as individual agents and as political communities; (4) no special transformation of our lives is required to apply these criteria that already belong to the way we reason and decide; therefore the thrust of the inquiry carries a certain degree of conservatism; and (5) finally, the criteria I refer to can be substantiated by the idea of ‘reasonableness’ and its multiple facets within practical reason: I take it as a notion that cuts across the domain of practical reason, including ethical, legal and political uses.