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

Abstract

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.