“Call It Public Metaphysic”: A New Way for Liberalism in Sebastiano Maffettone’s Works

Sebastiano Maffettone is a well-known Italian professor of Political Theory. His interests range from theories of justice to normative and applied ethics, from liberalism to global justice and so on. His contribution to the dissemination of John Rawls’s works in Italy is universally acknowledged. Here, I intend to focus on some works in which Maffettone exposes his thoughts about liberalism with a peculiar reference to Rawls’s Political Liberalism (Rawls 1993). In light of his sympathetic interpretation of Rawls’s masterpiece, Maffettone offers a re-examination of political liberalism as a sort of liberal ethos and as a pluralist theory of values. My reading proposal of Maffettone’s works is organized as follows: first, I introduce Maffettone’s idea of liberalism, with a special regard to the relationship between justification and legitimation. Second, I stop to illustrate Maffettone’s defense of Rawls’s political liberalism and his intention to ameliorate its performances by adopting the so-called frame-liberalism. Third, I focus on public metaphysics, in order to highlight Maffettone’s idea of liberalism as liberal public ethics. I see such a reference to public metaphysics as necessary to clarify the deep sense of Rawlsian political liberalism, ordered to include – under certain conditions - any ‘substantial’ difference into the public debate, be it cultural, metaphysical, or religious. Fourth, I draw some conclusions.