Scholastic Approaches to Reasonable Disagreement

Author(s):  
Rudolf Schuessler

This book aims to answer key questions surrounding (purported) conflicts of human rights at the European Court of Human Rights. Some of these questions concern the very existence of human rights conflicts. Can human rights really conflict with one another? Or should they be interpreted in harmony with one another? Other questions relate to the resolution of genuine human rights conflicts. How should such genuine conflicts be resolved? To what extent is balancing desirable? And which understanding of balancing should be employed? Throughout the book, contributors aim to answer these questions by engaging in concerted debate on both the existence and resolution of human rights conflicts. To increase its practical relevance, the discussion is framed around leading judgments of the European Court. The book ultimately aims to suggests, through the prism of reasonable disagreement, concrete ways forward in the ongoing debate on human rights conflicts at Europe’s human rights court.


Politics ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-144
Author(s):  
James (Eddie) Hyland

The claim that democracy requires a particular type of political scepticism for its justification has an initial plausibility. The present article argues, however, that Bufacchi does not succeed in adequately identifying the relevant type of uncertainty. Secondly, it is claimed here that Bufacchi's analysis neglects a crucial element in the justification of democracy, namely, the positive evaluation of moral autonomy. When the role of autonomy is given its proper place epistemology becomes secondary, providing a basis not for scepticism but for a theory such as Rawls's theory of reasonable disagreement.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 530-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Barry ◽  
David Wiens

Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing to explore the limits of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing (qua beneficiary) if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing per se does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts.


2018 ◽  
pp. 10-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Z. Elgin

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 598-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabienne Peter

At the core of political liberalism is the claim that political institutions must be publicly justified or justifiable to be legitimate. What explains the significance of public justification? The main argument that defenders of political liberalism present is an argument from disagreement: the irreducible pluralism that is characteristic of democratic societies requires a mode of justification that lies in between a narrowly political solution based on actual acceptance and a traditional moral solution based on justification from the third-person perspective. But why should we take disagreements seriously? This—epistemic question—has not received the attention it deserves so far. I argue that the significance of public justification can be explained through the possibility of reasonable disagreement. In a reasonable disagreement, the parties hold mutually incompatible beliefs, but each is justified to hold the belief they do. I shall use the notion of a reasonable disagreement to explain the possibility of an irreducible pluralism of moral and religious doctrines and, on that basis, why the justification of political institutions has to be public.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document