Legitimitatea dizidentei. Nesupunerea civica si ratiunea publica rawlsiana

Abstract

The tension between fundamental human rights and democratic (majoritarian) legitimacy is both critical and analytically rich for contemporary normative theories of democracy – and for the issue of morally acceptable civil disobedience as well. I briefly discuss the challenge this tension raises for three of the
mainstream approaches to this issue, namely republicanism, liberalism and deliberative democracy. I move then to a detailed account of the early Rawlsian justification of civil disobedience, and in the third step of my argument I advance the idea that Rawls’ theory of public reason offers a particularly strong framework for understanding disobedience as an effective means for promoting justice and legitimacy in contemporary democracies.