My research question concerns the relationship between individual interest and common good as this is treated in most of current normative democratic theories. In particular, I want to enquire how political knowledge and motivation to act relate to each other. Consequently, I intend in the first place to tackle the meta-ethical debate about internalism or externalism of reasons for action and to put in question the widespread idea that knowledge is not per se sufficient to motivate action. In the second place, I want to consider the opposition between the general, impartial (neutral) point of view and the personal one, in order to seek whether there is a credible objective notion of one’s individual interest and how this can work, if it works, to constitute a common conception of the interest of all. Finally I focus my research on recent democratic theories, not only because they are the theoretical tools nowadays democratic governments have to use to legitimize themselves, but also because democratic regimes put their citizens in the need and duty to choose between their personal interest and the general one both as subjects and as legislators.

Pluralism is an ineradicable feature of contemporary societies, since they host a plurality of views of the world and conceptions of the good life. Recent normative political theory has provided the debate with proposals for a political accommodation of the fact of pluralism and with theoretical accounts of the notion of pluralism.
Rawlsian political liberalism answers the question of how to govern the fact of pluralism through a robust political agreement on a conception of justice compatible with all specific conceptions of the good held by citizens. The pluralist proposal, on the other hand, suggests to focus more on the search for terms of peaceful coexistence rather than to promote consensus. Pluralism is considered the natural outcome of human capacity of reasoning and therefore no constraint must be put on its development.
The main interest of my research hypothesis are disagreements concerning political matters occurring when disputants do not share the same framework and competing arguments entering the debate hinder a common justification, that is foundational disagreements. While Rawlsian tradition considers foundational disagreements about justice unreasonable, given that the conception of justice is emended by considerations about the good, pluralists concentrate on problems of legitimation and order generated by foundational disagreements rather than on disagreement itself.
The starting point of my research is to put such underestimation of disagreement into question and cast light on its normative weight. An analysis of the structure of disagreement and of its political implications is a helpful mean to identify weaknesses of available theories and to at least sketch guidelines for an alternative theoretical project. On the metaphilosophical level, I would like to explore how normative political theory should behave when facing foundational disagreement. On a genuinely normative political level, I would like to find out if disagreement about the notion of justice must be considered foundational. This second important question clearly challenges liberalism, considering the relationship between the (singular) conception of justice and the (plural) conceptions of the good controversial.

The aim of my research is to enquire how and why explicitly descriptive theories seem to provide normative guidance. Specifically, I will focus on the tradition of political realism, ranging from its classics to its recent rebirth, in order to raise the question of why political realism is normative. My hypothesis draws the attention on the specific interaction between its view of reality and its view of the agent, which – I will argue – makes descriptive analyses hold normative implications. Given a reality, independent from beliefs and desires, and given that we are not omnipotent, some state of affairs will be necessary. An instrumentally rational actor will find these necessary features of reality to be constraints on his actions and can be thus said to have normative power over him. My argument will be structured as follow: in the first chapter, I analyse political realism in its ontological roots, and I conclude that it implies a kind of metaphysical realism. I call this view of reality ‘effectual realism’ and of political reality ‘Hobbesian view’. In the second chapter, I describe how necessities emerge from these states of affairs. The Hobbesian view is revealed to portrait cooperation and conflict as necessary facts, things we are not able to change. In the third chapter I present the idea of instrumental rationality, i.e. that reasons is a calculus of means to ends. However, I introduce a slight twist in this concept, which I feel accounts better for the view of political realism. What matters politically is not just preferences, according to this view, but the active effort to realize your preferences. In other words, political realism takes seriously the idea that rationality presupposes, as meta-preference, the preference to realize your own preferences. In the fourth chapter, I draw all these three premises together in order to infer my conclusion. From reality, necessities and instrumentally rational actor, political realism gathers normative claims on actors. I then generalize the conclusion beyond political realism. Any background reality frames the conditions in which we act, and any description of it holds normative implications for instrumentally rational actors. Thus, confirming my hypothesis: any descriptive theory of reality is weakly normative for instrumentally rational actors. This kind of normativity, I argue, is akin to the epistemic normativity of logic and philosophy of science.

My dissertation is about disagreement. In particular, it focuses on the problem of how disagreement is to be dealt within the context of liberal democratic societies. The perspective from which this issue is tackled is that of normative political philosophy and it regards both how disagreement should be conceptualized in such context, but also how citizens should behave in the discussion of norms and policies upon which they deeply disagree. In particular, this work focuses on disagreements about ethical issues, which are widespread and pervasive in contemporary democracies. Since such disagreements represent an important portion of political debates and may sometimes constitute inception for collisions and violent episodes, the scope of this work is relevant with regards to the reality of current debates in democratic societies. However, understanding the problem of political philosophy is important also at the level of theoretical research. Indeed, that of disagreement among citizens who are to live together in the same society represents one of the most long-standing issues in political philosophy, having its roots in those social contract theories defended by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Moreover, starting with the publication of John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, this issue has gained new and tremendous interest in contemporary debates of normative political philosophy. In particular, among liberal political theorists, the mainstream position has at its core the concept of public justification, namely the idea that political authority can be considered legitimate only insofar as the reasons given for political action can be reasonably accepted by those subjected to it.
In this work, I seek to critically evaluate the public justification approach and to highlight some tensions within its theoretical project, which I find unsatisfying in its lack of attention with respect to the phenomenon of disagreement. I strenuously believe that in order to address the questions of how disagreement should be treated within the political context of a democratic society, a deep inquiry into the nature of disagreement itself is necessary. Only when it is clear what a disagreement is, it is possible to find means to deal with it. In this sense, I do not provide answers to particular disputes, or settle some disagreements by favouring certain positions over others. Rather, I attempt to provide theoretical tools to comprehend and treat those very disputes in the political context.
The hypothesis from which this work begins is the idea that the dominant, mainstream theories of justificatory liberalism are unsatisfying and should be rejected because of their detrimental treatment of disagreement. In particular, I argue that their method in tackling the issue of how individuals holding different views and beliefs can live together in a stable and harmonious society is unpersuasive. Seeking a practical solution and rejecting a philosophical approach to the problem, justificatory liberals simply miss the point about disagreement. From this hypothesis, I draw the thesis that in order to treat disagreements in democratic societies, it is necessary to understand what a disagreement fundamentally consists in. Only with a convincing account of the phenomenon of disagreement, it is possible to identify its normative implications. Finally, to achieve these results, I propose a methodological approach defending metaethics as a workable tool apt to explain and account for certain normative phenomena.
Chapters 1-3 are methodological and are concerned with metaphilosophical questions about how the problem of disagreement should be tackled from the perspective of political philosophy. In the first two chapters, I critically evaluate the two most prominent accounts of justificatory liberalism and reject them. In chapter three, I present and defend my methodological approach by showing the importance of metaethical understanding for normative political philosophy. Chapter 4, is devoted to clarify what a disagreement actually is and explain its nature. Chapters 5-6 are the normative ones and focus on how citizens should respond to disagreement in the context of democratic societies and what principles of deliberation they should abide to.