Title of thesis: Pluralism and Political Disagreement: Between Realism and Moralism.

Abstract: My research focuses on contemporary democratic societies and it aims at analyzing, from a theoretical point of view, how they should cope with the fact of enduring pluralism and irreducible disagreement about moral and political matters. A preliminary goal is to identify the merits and weaknesses of the two mainstream alternatives in contemporary literature, i.e. Rawlsian political liberalism and the theory of modus vivendi, respectively representatives of the idealist and realist approaches in normative political theory. I claim that while the notion of consensus typical of political liberalism is too strong and hardly achievable in reality, the merely strategic appeasement of respective forces represented by modus vivendi does not account in a satisfactory way for moral reasons that are present in the public debate and trigger social mechanisms. My research wants to show that one way or the other, disagreement is taken into consideration only as an obstacle to the achievement of consensus and as a threaten to social stability. My goal is to explore an original path between these mainstreams and to look for a normative perspective able to restore the worth of disagreement by conceiving it as a resource for the progress of public discourse and political debate. Contrary to the idealistic extreme, pluralism should not be filtered through an externally imposed moral criterion. Contrary to the realistic extreme, moral motives and inspirations that prompt citizens to search for acceptable terms of cooperation are to be recognized as decisive for the achievement of order under conditions that be at one time desirable and practicable.

Research interests:

Normative (and epistemological) issues in political philosophy The Habermasian answer to the Rawlsian paradigm The polysemy of the notion of pluralism Pluralism and liberalism Pluralism and disagreement How the dimensions of pluralism are treated in moralism and realism Disagreement as a normative question

Graduated from: Università degli Studi di Milano

Degree: MA in Philosophy

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