La question de l’identité n’est pas nouvelle, mais c’est sans nul doute avec l’avènement du débat libéraux-communautariens consécutif à la parution de Théorie de la justice de Rawls que l’acuité et la portée du problème identitaire transparaît nettement dans les travaux théoriques des uns et des autres. Aux libéraux, censés nous présenter une version procédurale de l’identité, s’opposent les communautariens et leur vision de la personne profondément ancrée dans des valeurs qu’elle ne pourrait renier sans se perdre à jamais elle-même.Pour (...) autant, l’intuition qui guide ce travail est qu’un certain libéralisme peut tout à fait parvenir à proposer une vision conséquente de l’identité. Le présent propos s’attache à reconsidérer les termes de cette confrontation en donnant essentiellement la parole à trois philosophes , sans pour autant s’interdire d’autres références moins impliquées dans ce débat .The question of identity is surely not a new one. However, the rise of the liberal-communautarian debate as a consequence of the publication of A theory of justice gave it a real acuity. Indeed, liberals, with their so-called procedural vision of identity, conflict with communautarians and their understanding of the person as genuinely embedded in a set of values she couldn’t repudiate without disappearing herself.This study works on an adjustment of this Manichean setting of the problem, by establishing a dialogue between three philosophers : Taylor and Walzer, as members of the communautarian team, and Rawls, as the liberal opponent; this, however, won’t prevent us from working on authors who are not directly involved in this debate . The main idea of this paper is that a particular liberalism is able to propose a vision of identity which takes seriously the most communautarian criticisms, so that the traditional gap between the two doctrines becomes deeply meaningless. (shrink)

Public health involves the use of power to change institutions and redistribute resources and deliberately to shape individual thought and behavior. This requires normative legitimation and demands ethical critique. This article explores concepts that are vital to public health ethics, but have been relatively neglected. These are membership, solidarity and the concept of place. The article argues that the practice of public health should recognize the equal rights of membership in communities of health justice. Public health should also rely on (...) a sense of obligation and mutual aid in a world of shared vulnerability and reciprocal recognition. Finally, public health achieves its goals not merely—and perhaps not most fundamentally—through information and altering the logical ratiocination of individuals or groups, but rather through the reformation of sense and sensibility. (shrink)

This article argues that Honneth’s ‘plural conception of justice’, founded on a theory of recognition, does not succeed in distancing itself from Rawls’ liberal theory of justice. The article develops its argument by evaluating three major objections to Rawls’ liberalism raised by Honneth in his recent articles on justice: namely, first, that the parties responsible for choosing principles of justice are too individualistic and their practical reasoning too instrumentalist; second, that by taking as its ‘object-domain’ the negative liberty of persons, (...) Rawls’ theory fails to promote the actual realization of liberty; and finally, that Rawls’ method of principle justification undermines the ‘priority’ of its Kantian ‘formality’ by presupposing a substantive commitment to a conception of individual good. Arguing that Honneth’s interpretation of Rawls’ theory contains important errors, the article concludes that both theories share the basic intention of securing for all citizens the material and institutional conditions for the actualization of otherwise merely formal liberties or, in Honneth’s terms, mutual self-realization. (shrink)