THE RIGHT TO HAVE A SAY: A THEORY OF JUSTICE FOR DISAGREEMENTS

The central claim of this work is straightforward: if one endorses a nonexclusionary standpoint, then one ought also to avoid excluding people from disagreements. This is valid even if these people hold particularly deplorable worldviews. In political theory, this is not the generally held view. Political liberalism has endorsed the exclusion of unreasonable people. More or less explicitly, modus vivendi theory also limits access to the relevant constituency for those people who do not share the higher good of peace, or who are unable to meet other requirements. In this work, I aim to demonstrate that exclusion is bad. Therefore, the point of this project is to begin with the debate on pluralism and disagreement in order to affirm a novel normative standpoint – a non-exclusionary political theory. This theory defends a general right to have a say. To do so, I divide the argument into three parts. First, I define the non-exclusionary desideratum. I also pay attention to conceptual difficulties in existing responses to pluralism in political theory. Then, to answer the need to construct a normative standpoint that people with different worldviews can affirm, I develop a perspectivist political theory. In the second part of this work, I recognize two orders of normativity, and I idealize an ideal position of disagreement – the many-to-one relationship. At the heart of this normative proposal, there is a general standpoint of justice (the right to have a say), and a conception of legitimacy for societies where all members have a right to have a say. For me, a decision is legitimate when all members can recognize their individual subject-object relations in the outcome. Finally, in the third part of the dissertation, I consider the pluralistic society – an ideal society where all members have a right to have a say.