Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche

My aim in this essay is to highlight some aspects of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of human rights. In the first section, after recalling some elements of the Kantian model of foundation of human rights, I will illustrate the main lines of Habermas’s conception of human rights as developed in Faktizität und Geltung. In the following section I will express some reservations and introduce an attempt by Habermas to overcome them. In the final section, I will be concerned with some recent developments of Habermas’s thinking and try to show how they are linked to the previous positions.

I  diritti umani sono realmente universali? Al di là delle dichiarazioni politiche e dei proclami ideologici, ci sono ragioni per ritenere che possano sintetizzare un codice normativo minimo valido in tutto il mondo o la loro origine occidentale non pregiudica piuttosto la loro accettabilità presso le altre culture? In questo lavoro Leonardo Marchettoni esplora questo complesso di problemi attingendo ai contributi di diverse discipline. Dopo aver ricostruito gli aspetti salienti della storia dei diritti umani, analizza i tentativi di risposta alla questione dell’universalizzabilità dei diritti e la rilevanza della riflessione contemporanea sul problema del relativismo e della natura della cultura. L’approdo di questo percorso ribadisce, nel dualismo tra fiducia nello strumento del dialogo e constatazione realista della pervasività delle distorsioni indotte dal potere, un fondamentale atteggiamento pluralista.

My aim in this article is to compare traditional multiculturalist political theory with a new paradigm
in which the usual strategies for dealing with cultural diversities are replaced by the tools
provided by inferential semantics as developed by Robert Brandom. The upshot is the transition
from a landscape which is highly demanding with respect to the common assumptions among
different views of the world to a dialogical context in which contrasting beliefs can come to light
more freely.

The paper aims to analyse some aspects of the charge of incoherence usually leveled
against relativism. I maintain that, if there are strong reasons to hold the incoherence
of relativism, on the other side, there are no alternative options that can preserve the
reality of differences. In the end, I suggest to assume the relativistic attitude as a
reminder of the temporal and spatial incompleteness of our attempts to represent the
world.

In this paper I raise a number of issues concerning Brandom’s pragmatist explanation of norms. I will argue that Brandom’s attempt to explain normative statuses through recourse to normative attitudes does not succeed in distinguishing norms from regularities of behaviour. I suggest that talk about normative attitudes is translatable into dispositionalist terms, within a language devoid of normative notions, and that the thesis of the institution of norms by the practical attitudes of the members of the community fails to make sense of the idea of objective normative statuses existing above what single practitioners hold as correct according to their understanding of norms. In the first section I will consider Brandom’s discussion of the rule-following problem presented in the first chapter of MIE; in the second section I will analyse Brandom’s arguments against the accountability of attitudes in a non-normative language, and put forward a dispositionalist reading of Brandomian semantics; I will then try to consider whether the dispositionalist
reading of normative attitudes entails a corresponding naturalisation of Brandom’s semantic project, and examine Brandom’s critique of the tenets of AI functionalism in Between Saying and Doing.