The morality of equality: political authority, social justice and the second-person standpoint

• Grant number: 15/13913-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2015
• End date: July 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Political Theory
• Principal Investigator: Álvaro de Vita
• Grantee: Lucas Cardoso Petroni
• Supervisor: Stephen Leicester Darwall
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Yale University, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 12/24854-6 - The normative grounds of social justice, BP.DR

Abstract

The project proposes to articulate and defend an alternative justificatory argument for rights associated with distributive principles in a democratic society. Different from common theories on the field - the interest-based model and the status-based model - the project carries out a third moral ground for rights: the model based on mutual respect between equals. The project has two main sections. The first one is an attempt to contrast the respective models highlighting their assumptions and limits. After that it shall be argued that the proper normative reason for grounding political and social rights is a second-personal authority. Although normative reasons based on mutual respect are found in many moral contractualist theories (John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon, Jurgen Habermas, e. g.), the project will explore the interrelated notions of (a) second-personal reasons for action and (b) a second-personal authority to make claims, as they have been developed in the works of Stephen Darwall.