My paper is on the republican version of patriotism and its justification, as
developed most systematically by Philip Pettit and Maurizio Viroli. The
essence of the justification is as follows: patriotism is to be viewed as
valuable insofar as it is an indispensable instrument for the upholding of
the central republican ideal, namely freedom understood as non-domination.
My primary aim is to evaluate the normative force of this justification. In
the first section, I introduce minimal descriptive definitions of the
concepts of patriotism and the patria. Second, I reconstruct the republican
patria-ideal to which patriotism is linked to. In the third section, I
reconstruct the republican justification of patriotism. Finally, I ask what
we justify when we justify republican patriotism. Two views are prevalent in
this regard. According to the first, republican patriotic motivation,
similarly to its justification, ought to be instrumental itself too (Pettit,
Viroli). I argue that this view is untenable, since it is in tension with
the minimal definition of patriotism. The conclusion is that the other view
- according to which the patriotic motivation ought to be of intrinsic
character (Miller) - possesses greater normative force.
Intrinsic character of minimal hypersurfaces in flat spaces.
