In this paper I submit that, if one takes seriously the distinction between citizenship rights and human rights, the list of the latter must be minimized. Many of the rights that we are used to call human rights are, in fact, citizenship rights and they belong to a history of citizenship in some specific states around the world. Thelist of human rights must be much shorter than the list of citizenship rights, whatever that list may be in accordance with the (...) grounds attributed to human rights by different philosophical approaches. My plea for a qualification of which rights should count as human rights and the idea of a short list challenges the consensus among international lawyers. Nevertheless, it does not aim at a critique of human rights as such. On the contrary, the general intention of the very idea of a short list is to strengthen the moral force of human rights in order to make them meaningful in different political contexts. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the new theory of political liberalism, developed by people like jJohn Rawls and Charles Larmore. This is a quite specific subject and it should not be confused with another and more usual meaning attached to the same expression. This more conventional meaning of political liberalism is primarily a form of liberalism which stresses the political sphere - the state - as opposed to the economic sphere - the marketplace. However, the new theory of political (...) liberalism is not in opposition to economic liberalism in this way. Instead, the adjective political refers to the fact that this recent defence of liberalism avoids reliance on comprehensive and controversial religious, metaphysical, epistemological, and moral views. In this sense, political liberalism is a theory of argumentative restraint regarding the defence of liberal justice. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the new theory of political liberalism, developed by people like jJohn Rawls and Charles Larmore. This is a quite specific subject and it should not be confused with another and more usual meaning attached to the same expression. This more conventional meaning of political liberalism is primarily a form of liberalism which stresses the political sphere - the state - as opposed to the economic sphere - the marketplace. However, the new theory of political (...) liberalism is not in opposition to economic liberalism in this way. Instead, the adjective political refers to the fact that this recent defence of liberalism avoids reliance on comprehensive and controversial religious, metaphysical, epistemological, and moral views. In this sense, political liberalism is a theory of argumentative restraint regarding the defence of liberal justice. (shrink)

First, this article puts forth a political and cultural explanation for the fact that the work of Rawls and other American liberal analytic political philosophers was neglected in Portugal during the 1970s and 1980s. Second, the article describes Portuguese reactions to Rawls's ideas in the 1990s, focusing on commentaries by scholars and `public intellectuals'. Throughout this period, there was a gradual shift from glib partisan judgements to more careful responses. Third, the reception of Rawls in Portugal is compared with the (...) reception in Spain. This comparison shows that both broad social context and the nature of academia tended to be more hospitable to Rawls in Spain than in Portugal. However, the situation is changing. (shrink)