SALVATORE VECA E LE SFIDE DELLA TEORIA POLITICA NORMATIVA

This article, in memory of Salvatore Veca, comments on two of Veca’s contributions to Il Politico: “L’idea di equità” (1997) and “I problemi di una teoria della giustizia globale” (2006). The overall aim is to clarify Veca’s methodological positions on the various challenges facing normative political theory. In the first two sections, it provides an overview of Veca’s ideas on fairness, understood as a partial achievement of contemporary liberal democracies, and on the idea of global justice understood as an aspiration or “reasonable utopia”. In a third section, it distinguishes between three different kinds of abstraction, and in each case examines its usefulness and its risks as a method of theorizing about normative ideals.