Autonomia della morale ed eteronomia della politica: la proposta liberal di Charles Larmore.

Charles Larmore’s political liberalism lies in the theoretical frame set out by J. Rawls, but it is no less true that Larmore develops an original thinking, making a significant contribution to the post-rawlsian political debate. This thesis is intended to provide a critical survey of the political thought of Charles Larmore. Resulting from a sharp analysis, I have singled out a series of aporias in Larmore’s liberal proposal, some issues that I tackle in detail henceforth. To gain an appreciation of Larmore’s speculative evolution, in the first chapter I have focused on Larmore’s attempt to develop a neutral justification of political neutrality. It comes out that such enterprise is at stake because of the comprehensiveness of the principle of equal respect for persons, on which neutral justification supposedly relies. By dwelling on the so-called ‘platonism of reasons’, in the second chapter attention is shifted to the “normative turn” that Larmore’s thought takes at diverging from a constructivist proceduralism to a metaphysical ontology. Likewise, the aforementioned Larmore’s normative turn proves to leave a good deal of crucial questions in a fog. Thus, and in agreement with contextualist epistemology, to justify a normative point of view Larmore endorses a post metaphysical perspective, but at the same time he assumes a metaphysical moral realism concerning the foundation of norms. Such theoretical assumption, in which politics and morality are intertwined, is ambiguous. In this theoretical framework the moral basis of political liberalism are conceived as a heteronomous foundation of politics. Consequently, the metaphysical position sketched by Larmore is barely compatible with most accredited conceptions of modern democracy. Therefore, Larmore’s liberalism apparently stumbles with the same hindrances that he wanted to remove, being this the reason for the fundamentals of the principle of respect for persons seem to me ill-founded when it comes to nail normativity down. Finally, in the third chapter I have shed insight into Larmore’s reading of J. Rawls, J. Habermas, and Ph. Pettit. To my mind, the metaphysical ideas of the autonomy of morality and platonism of reasons are highly indebted to Larmore’s reading of his main three interlocutors. On the one hand, Larmore argues that Rawls has neither sufficiently examined the ethical foundation nor the moral basis and the sources of normativity. In addition to this criticism, on the other hand Larmore regrets that Habermas and Pettit do not realise that the respect for persons implied in their perspectives is a premise. In light of all this, Larmore comes to the conclusion that the points of view of these three theorists cannot constitute a real alternative to liberalism. For these reasons, and for Larmore’s shortcoming at founding the principles of equal respect for person, I have sought to overcome the issue at hand by means of displaying a cluster of alternative categories embedded in utopian thought. Despite all the problematic ensuing from Larmore’s proposal, his political view is definitely worth deserving attention, especially for the key role played by the notion of respect, a principle in which abides the right to diversity in our plural society nowadays.