Tag: Political Philosophy

• On Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty"
  publications

  The main purpose of Isaiah Berlin's concept of the "two kinds of liberty" is not to distinguish negative liberty from positive liberty in order to criticize the latter and advocate the former. Rather, it is to reveal the incommensurability among a plurality of values and, on that basis, to show clearly that monism is the chief source of the misunderstanding of different forms of liberty and value.

• The Metaphysical Foundations of Rawls's Moral Constructivism
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  Rawls's moral constructivism is a basic theoretical method that emphasizes both objectivity and subjectivity. It argues that ethical norms are constructed by subjects within a rational procedure and under necessary initial conditions, so that norms are realized as the outcome of the procedure rather than deduced in advance. This implies that moral constructivism lowers the status of ethical theories that rely on the epistemic completeness of realism. It further holds that moral norms should be understood as the constructed result of the categorical imperative procedure, and that this procedure is possible because the human subject possesses a distinctive metaphysical characteristic: reflectivity. In this context, reflectivity integrates the mind's self-referentiality, purposiveness, absolute spontaneity, and living spirituality, thereby becoming at once theoretical and practical, conceptualist and German idealist. The core of constructivism, and of reflectivity itself, is manifested in Kant's account of the fact of reason, through which an almost scientific mode of representation seeks to unify ideality and living spirituality.