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In this paper, after offering a short vindication of public health as public good that liberal government should guarantee, I will show why Ronald Dworkin’s theory of justice in health care does not offer guidance in two cases that arise in pandemics: 1) how to set priorities in rationing access to intense care unit, 2) how to choose between vaccination policies. This lack of guidance is due to an unrealistic assumption that follows from Dworkin’s idea of the unity of value: that it is always possible to strike a balance between individual rights and collective claims in maintaining a public good (in this case public health).

The spread of fake news in the digital arena has put into question the traditional idea of the self-regulation of public debate: the well-known metaphor of “free market of ideas”. Because of the availability of digital media, the reduction of the overall cost in producing and disseminating false news has dramatically fallen. Everybody at any time can enter the public debate, even though with bad arguments. At the same time, the competition between traditional and digital media has produced an astonishing reduction of the average incomes of the professional journalists. This paper aims to bring to the fore the metaphor of the market of ideas, metaphor that has been used in the US for reducing the extent of public regulation of medias. After a short introduction about historical the genesis of the “free market of ideas”, the article to show the usefulness of the concept, by highlighting the notion of “failures of the market”, which occur in the digital arena and two possible remedies

It could be successfully argued that there is a general obligation to save lives in danger at sea and that this obligation is moral in nature. Such reasoning, however, is not the specific aim of this paper. Instead, this paper focuses on the legal obligations of the European Union (EU), its Member States, other neighbouring countries, and the EU Border and Coast Guard, towards migrants attempting the risky journey to Europe, in order to find out whether there are any legal steps that can be taken in order to help eliminate deaths in the Mediterranean. The article focuses on the main International Conventions on maritime law, international human rights law, international asylum law, the relevant legislation and regulations of the European Union and Italian law, offering an assessment on the legality of the EU border control operations at sea. The main argument of this paper is that the European policy on the enforcement of border control at sea fails to respect the basic principle of legality, and therefore it is against the Rule of Law.

In this paper, some critical remarks on M. La Torre’s book, Bioetica in tempo di pandemia are exposed. These remarks concerns: 1) the justification of paternalism according to La Torre’s liberal account of bioethics. If paternalism is justified then it is open to debate in which sense his proposal can be labelled as “liberal”; 2) what one earns with assuming that in order to solve conflicts of values we should prefer moral specificationism in front of Alexy’s balancing between legal principles. We will show that in arguing for specificationism La Torre tries to avoid the phenomenon of tragic choice, without succeeding; 3) the lack of clarity in depicting the idea of “sacred life”. This idea is in tension with the liberal vindication of the right to interrupt pregnancy

In civil law systems, statutes and other legal texts sometimes refer to ‘custom’. In international law, it is undisputed that ‘custom’, alongside with treaties or conventions, is one of the main legal sources. The bulk of this paper is devoted to an attempt at answering a single, simple question: what is custom? What is it that statutes and other legal materials refer to, when they refer to ‘custom’? In answering this question the beginning of wisdom is to realize that there is no single, unique concept custom. ‘Custom’ designates different phenomena, which should be carefully distinguished. It is, then, possible to mould several concepts of custom, and customary rule. In the first, longer section of the paper I provide a series of definitions, of increasing complexity, identifying different (families of) concepts: custom as a mere behavioural regularity, social rules, causal and normative conceptions of custom, customs as strategic interaction phenomena (Lewisian conventions and fair play norms belong to this latter family). In the second, shorter section I argue that, given deep doctrinal disagreements about the features of custom as a source of the law, and the lack of relevant legal provisions, all one can do, in trying to understand what statutes and other legal texts refer to when they speak of ‘custom’, is to list several diffrrent possible meanings of the word – what is done in the first section -, giving up the project of selecting one of them as the right relevant meaning. In the concluding subsection of the paper I show that, Hart’s own remarks (in his Postscript to The Concept of Law) notwithstanding, Hartian rules of recognition are best understood as customary, not as conventional, rules.

Demokrati, magt og ret è una raccolta di articoli comparsi sui quotidiani danesi in un arco temporale di poco meno di vent’anni, dal 1957 al 1974. Il tratto comune di questi articoli è la loro evidente riconducibilità alla filosofia “scientifica” di Ross. In questo saggio mi concentro su alcune questioni filosofiche e filosofico-giuridiche salienti che fanno capolino in modo ricorrente negli articoli raccolti nel volume che qui si commenta. Si tratta, in particolare, 1) del rifiuto delle certezze metafisiche; 2) dell’importanza della chiarezza linguistica; 3) della relazione tra diritto e potere e, infine, 4) della distinzione tra punto di vista interno e punto di vista esterno. Demokrati, magt og ret is a collection of articles published by Danish newspapers in a period of just under twenty years, from 1957 to 1974. In all these articles Ross’ “scientific philosophy” is clearly traceable. In this paper I focus on some relevant philosophical and legal-philosophical questions recurring in the articles collected in Demokrati, magt og. I deepen in particular 1) the rejection of metaphysics; 2) the importance of linguistic clarity; 3) the relation between law and power and, finally, 4) the distinction between internal and external aspect of norms.

Un saggio di Hannah Arendt è rimasto inedito per oltre 50 anni. Su quelle carte non è apposto un vero titolo, ma solo: A lecture. Il testo sviluppa uno dei temi più cari all’autrice: le diverse declinazioni della libertà e il loro rapporto con la rivoluzione. Manca di data, ma, essendo presenti molti riferimenti all’attualità, è facile dedurre che esso sia stato scritto tra la fine del 1966 e il 1967. Si tratta di un saggio apparentemente poco originale, poiché riprende molte idee espresse altrove, soprattutto nel grande trattato Sulla Rivoluzione pubblicato nel 1963. Tuttavia è interessante vedere come alcuni concetti già apparsi in altre pubblicazioni vengano impiegati per leggere gli accadimenti del presente, quali ad esempio il processo di decolonizzazione, la guerra del Vietnam, la rivoluzione cubana. Inoltre merito di questo testo è introdurre la formula the freedom to be free per riferirsi alla condizione necessaria per sperimentare la libertà piena, che per l’autrice non consiste nel mero godimento delle libertà civili, bensì nell’esercizio della libertà come partecipazione alla res pubblica. In questo articolo verranno messi in luce gli aspetti più interessanti del testo della Arendt, contestualizzandoli storicamente; in particolare verranno discussi le riflessioni dell’autrice sulle rivoluzioni in corso, il significato dell’espressione “libertà di essere liberi” e la distinzione tra liberty e freedom. One of Hannah Arendt’s essays has remained unpublished for over 50 years. The paper has no proper title, only the words A lecture written on it. The text develops one of the themes most dear to the author: the different conceptions of freedom and their relationship with revolution. The text also lacks a date; however, given the numerous references to current events, it is easy to deduce that it was written between the end of 1966 and 1967. The essay does not appear to be very original since it incorporates many ideas expressed elsewhere, especially in the great treatise On the Revolution published in 1963. However, it is interesting to observe how some concepts, already appearing in other publications, are here used to understand the actuality of the time, such as the process of decolonization, the Vietnam war and the Cuban revolution. Furthermore, the merit of this essay is to introduce the expression “the freedom to be free” to indicate the basic condition to have experience of full freedom, which for the author does not consist simply in obtaining civil liberties, but in the exercise of freedom as participation in the res publica. In this article, the most interesting aspects of Arendt’s text are highlighted in a historical frame – in particular, the author's reflections on ongoing revolutions, the meaning of the expression "freedom to be free" and the distinction between liberty and freedom are discussed.

In this paper I draw the outline of a psychological genealogy of normativity: an account of normativity as a complex neuro-psychological fact, entirely analysable in non-normative terms. As a first step, I introduce two of the main problems faced by the genealogical approach. I call the first one “Gibbard problem”: what kind of neuro-psychological state is normative judgment? I call the second one “irreducibility of normativity problem”: normative dynamics seem to be irreducible to causal dynamics. As a second step, I examine the “dual model” of the psychology of normative judgment developed by J. Haidt and J. Greene. I argue that the dual model is not able to solve the aforementioned problems. However, it points at the right direction. Moving from the conceptual framework and the difficulties outlined in the discussion of the dual model, I eventually propose an alternative model, the “model of control”. According to this model, normative guidance consists of a network of recursive control processes. Normative judgment is the conscious mental state we access when the relevant control process is completed. Reasons and norms are parameters that causally guide the process.

The aim of this paper is to introduce some elements of a research project in legal philosophy. Its goal is to identify some crucial topics for the definition of law. In the first part (§§ 1 & 2) I analyse some methodological difficulties of the dominant research on the definition of law. In the second part (§§ 3 & 4) I refer to some current development of law and sketch some characteristics of the object to be defined, corresponding to what can be called the process of law differentiation. In the last part of this contribute I try to sum up some elements to be taken in account in the definition of a differentiated law. Key words: Differentiation of law, Legal pluralism, Justice Riassunto Lo scopo di questo lavoro è quello di presentare alcuni aspetti di un progetto di ricerca in filosofia del diritto che si propone di identificare alcuni elementi cruciali per la definizione di diritto. Nella prima parte ( §§ 1 e 2 ) l’Autrice analizza alcune difficoltà metodologiche nella ricerca dominante sulla definizione di “diritto”. Nella seconda parte ( §§ 3 e 4) si riferisce ad alcuni aspetti dell’attuale sviluppo del diritto e traccia alcune caratteristiche dell'oggetto da definire, corrispondente a quello che può essere considerato il processo di differenziazione di diritto. Nell'ultima parte del lavoro si cerca di riassumere alcuni elementi da prendere in considerazione nella definizione del diritto all’esito del processo di differenziazione. Parole chiave: differenziazione del diritto, pluralismo giuridico, giustizia, Società e diritti, V. 1, N. 1 (2016): Editoriale

In this paper I argue that there exist conventions of a peculiar sort, which are neither norms nor regularities of behaviour, partaking of both. I proceed as follows. After a sketchy analysis of the meaning of ‘convention’, I give some examples of the kind of phenomena I have in mind: bodily skills, know-how, taste and style, habitus (P. Bourdieu), «disciplines» (M. Foucault). Then I group some arguments supporting my claim: (i) considerations about the identity conditions of precedents (D. Lewis) and about the projectibility of predicates in inductive inference generally (N. Goodman); (ii) thoughts about rule-following (L. Wittgenstein); (iii) an examination of some of J. R. Searle’s ideas about the «Background» of intentionality. I conclude with some remarks about the time-honoured antithesis ‘nature’ v. ‘convention’.

The paper discusses various criticisms that are frequently leveled against the so-called “age of rights” – i.e., the contemporary legal and political doctrine that places funda-mental rights at the center of legal and political discourse, and that shapes legal institu-tions accordingly (written, rigid constitution, judicial review of legislation, etc.). After providing a definition of the main features of the age of rights, the author discusses and tries to rebut the principal critical stances on this topic, mainly by making use of the theoretical tools deployed by contemporary analytical jurisprudence on legal rights and legal reasoning.

There is, according to many contemporary jurisprudential theories, a tight relationship between law and practical rationality: the law gives us, or at least it purports to give us, reasons for action. In his book, Legality (2011), Scott J. Shapiro puts forward what at first glance appears to be a new view in this vein. Shapiro calls it the “Planning Theory” of law; it provides an account of what the law is in terms of a particular kind of reasons: plans (a notion moulded, in his work in the philosophy of action, by Michael E. Bratman). In this paper, I provide a reconstruction of the Planning Theory as a view of the relationships between law and practical rationality, and I point to some fundamental issues which, when considered in this light, the theory leaves open, or which seem to raise trouble for it.