THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND ITS INJUSTICE
(with Pala, D.)
In the last decades, the environmental conditions of our planet have dramatically worsened. For example, planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.1 degrees Celsius since the 19th century, and most of this warming has occurred in the past 35 years. Moreover, since 1970, CO2 emissions have increased by about 90%, and the current rate of ocean acidification is faster than at any time in the past 300 million years. Besides this, it has been estimated that we are losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, i.e. about one to five species per year, with a precipitous decline of biodiversity. Hence, one could argue that we are currently experiencing an environmental crisis of unprecedented magnitude, pace and severity. There is an urgent need to reflect on this crisis from both a moral and political point of view, either in a comprehensive or in a more focussed way. In particular, we should ask: what makes the current environmental crisis or one of its specific manifestations distinctively bad or unjust?
Re-Solidarizing Europe and Defusing the Crisis
(with Ferrera, M.)
The very existence of the European Union is today under attack by an increasingly virulent Euroscepticism. In our view, the prime root of this “deep” political crisis is the sharp misalignment between the new nature of the EU after the establishment of EMU, its authority structure, and the normative order which underpins cooperation and the “sharing code” among the member states. Dangerous centrifugal forces feed on the apparent lack of awareness among national and European politicians about the “deep” causes of prolonged instability and existential threats. Yet survey evidence signals that a “silent majority” would be potentially available to support a far-sighted project of institutional reforms and of solidarization of the EU.
No Rest for the Wicked
Political realism and the inevitability of conflict
This paper tackles the issue of conflict within the framework of political realism. It aims to define what conflict is and to show that it is inevitable. I put forward a definition of conflict that pulls together two strands present in the literature: the presence of incompatible preferences and the disposition to impose them against the resistance of others. This second element is particularly important as it allows to neatly distinguish conflict from other similar concepts, like pluralism or disagreement among which it is sometimes confused, and to understand better its subcategories, violence and war. From these analysis, I extrapolate four significant features of conflict, which are appropriately highlighted by this definition: the relation to politics, the connection to violence, its neutrality to content and its unilateral emergence. Given its unilateral emergence, as long as even few people exhibit incompatible preferences and the disposition to impose them, conflicts would spontaneously emerge. This support the conclusion that conflicts, appropriately understood, are permanent features of the human world. Finally, I show how this analysis reflects on political philosophy. While the mainstream view ofRawlsian liberalism tends to underestimate the inevitability of conflict, the tradition of political realism captures it in a more satisfying way.
Thomas Hobbes
Lex Facit Veritatem
Sul pensiero di Hobbes convivono nella tradizione filosofica due interpretazioni molto diverse. La prima lo considera un difensore del soggettivismo, enfatizzandone la psicologia morale e la teoria soggettivistica del valore. La seconda, al contrario, lo ritiene un sostenitore dell’oggettivismo, sottolineando l’universalità e immutabilità delle leggi di natura. Le nozioni di verità che ne discendono sembrerebbero radicalmente diverse e incompatibili: un soggettivismo relativista nel primo caso e un oggettivismo universalista nel secondo. Lo scopo di questo scritto è chiarire come questa contraddizione sia solamente apparente. La relazione tra verità e politica per Hobbes si declina in modo diverso per quanto concerne i fatti e per quanto concerne i valori. Il disaccordo sui valori provoca conflitto, perché non vi è una soluzione vera da scoprire. Il disaccordo sui fatti, invece, è dovuto all’ignoranza ed è superabile grazie alle verità della scienza. Poiché le conseguenze dei nostri valori sono fatti è possibile dedurre che il disaccordo sui valori provoca il conflitto e il conflitto comporta il rischio di perdere la vita. Dunque, assumendo che la tendenza alla sopravvivenza sia un’attitudine quasi universale, Hobbes conclude che dobbiamo istituire lo Stato, che sancisce e impone una verità arbitraria per sopravvivere al pluralismo di valori.