This fourth and last part deals explicitly with normative political philosophy and examines its four fundamental categories: liberty, equality, justice, and solidarity. It does so in the light of the epistemological posture illustrated in Excursus 1, which entails two major differences from the mainstream literature in this field: political philosophy is not handled as a part of moral philosophy, as Isaiah Berlin still described their relationship. Practical philosophy, in the Aristotelian sense, is rather seen as comprising the two self-standing, but obviously not unrelated, spheres. Besides, in the present account normativity does not begin only when its main categories are laid on the table, as it happens in the present chapter, but has already shown up at more than one station of our journey: the legitimacy-identity-obligation complex highlighted the role values, principles and normative worldviews play in shaping the actors’ subjectivity, while the theory of global/lethal challenges in Chapter 7 explicitly argued a new obligation to do our best in order to ensure humankind’s survival. This obligation, which I call a meta-imperative, in the sense that it makes all other obligations possible and sensible, does not stem from a development of the categories we are going to examine in this chapter, though it has links to solidarity and justice. When normative problems involve our relationship to future generations and humankind against the background of our relationship to nature, we cannot expect the entire truth to come out of categories that over the course of centuries and in the context of one (Western) civilisation were devised with eyes focused on social relations among contemporaries.
In this part, however, it is not a task for a textbook to choose one normative doctrine out of many nor to give instructions and outline solutions to current problems such as those, say, raised by biotechnology or poverty or asymmetric warfare. It would be satisfactory enough if we were able to identify the problems, give them a name, and mark roadmaps that appear to be non-viable because they are too costly in material or ideal terms or laden with unacceptable consequences or unable to mean something for real political life.