Governamentalità biopolitica: inclusione e felicità. Genealogia storica e concettuale, sfide presenti e prospettive future di una politica per l'uomo e la società.
ProjectDisagreements, conflicts, disputes. Inclusion and Exclusion in Public Discourse
To appropriately account for the phenomenon of disagreement and its normative relevance for politics, it is necessary to distinguish its various sources and forms, to identify those issues about which individuals disagree and those strategies apt to deal with it. Aiming at analysing how to determine the boundaries of the concept of disagreement and to understand its epistemological and metaethical characters, disagreements regarding different and contradictory conceptions of life and death and issues concerning individual well-being, proposing conflicting conceptions of the good and happy life, are going to be considered. Disagreements of this kind are more and more relevant and present in contemporary politics and it is important to question whether such presence is either problematic or positive. In particular, it is important to understand whether such disagreements can be considered disputes, deep contrasts which may lead to deadlocks in which each one’s argument seem equally strong and unappealing for the other. Although such disagreements may not be resolvable through rational argumentation and, thus, should be considered intractable, it is important to understand that the parties at dispute strive to persuade one another of the rightness of their own thesis and engage to defend it. In this sense, since they need to measure their own opinions in rational discussion, the parties at dispute present their beliefs and in so doing those beliefs become explicit and the deepest assumptions beneath them are to be compared and measured. Indeed, the potential of moral and metaphysical disputes is evident when legitimate visibility is recognized both to those reasons at stake and to the dynamics of disagreement which guide the discussion and limit it to a normative comparison which is relevant independently of its solution.
Given the possibility and relevance of rationally irresolvable disagreements, the research will focus on those political and legal strategies for the regulation of political disagreements concerning the justifiability of institutions, laws, and norms, which may cause social conflicts when not applied correctly. The research will consider those disagreements concerning the regulation of norms for the disposal of one’s body by public agencies, upon the morality of which individuals disagree; and those disagreements concerning the role of public agencies in the regulation of economy and distribution of material goods. First, it is important to consider those strategies which assume that political disagreements can be resolved for there is only one correct and identifiable solution to the issue at stake. Such strategies imply the claim that norms are absolutely valid and that each and every rational person should be able to recognize. A second kind of strategies does not intend to resolve disagreement, but to deal with it peacefully in order for it not to turn into conflict. Such strategies grant, in the form of fundamental rights, spheres of liberty and individual autonomy within which individuals are free to act as they please, without the need of accounting for their behaviour to others. Strategies that defend procedural mechanism, as the rule of majority for the production of decisions binding for all (though always revisable) or the idea of compromise, fall in this category. Finally, there are strategies that assume the inescapability of disagreement and, thus, are ready to sacrifice the principle of formal legal equality and also the integrity of the political society to insure that each person can live under each one’s system of rules and values. An example of such approach is normative pluralism, intended as a possible solution to the problem of political disagreement. In the research, all these strategies will be judged upon and evaluated with respect not only to their feasibility, but also their effects in terms of inclusion and exclusion.