From why-why-why to global justice

When Laura Valentini thinks about freedom, justice, and obligations, she sometimes paces up and down her office. “This actually does help me think,” says the Chair of Philosophy and Political Theory at LMU, “even if not quite in the Aristotelian peripatetic style.” “Fortunately,” she adds, “I’m not in one of those modern offices with glass partitions. Otherwise, my colleagues might think I’m a bit mad!”

In fact, Valentini does most of her work sitting at a computer. Until recently she was also a visiting professor at King’s College London. For her outstanding research, she is now receiving a Princess Therese of Bavaria Prize from LMU. Princess Therese was herself a scientist and researched anthropological and zoological phenomena on her travels in Europe and America. She was a strong advocate for the education of women and was the first woman to be awarded an honorary doctorate at LMU in 1897. The prize in her name was open this year to female researchers in the humanities and cultural studies.

“It’s an honor to be recognized with this award,” says Valentini, “and I hope to serve as a role model for young female researchers and can encourage them to pursue a similar academic career path.” As a woman and mother, she has had “very positive experiences” as an academic.

On freedom and morality

In her award-winning research, Laura Valentini addresses the big questions of life. When is a person truly free? What makes a promise morally binding? And how can we practice political philosophy such that it has both solid theoretical foundations and social relevance? In the process, she wrestles with the central concepts of political theory and moral philosophy: justice, freedom, rights, and obligations.

She acquired an interest in philosophy at an early age. In her home country, she studied the history of philosophy for three years at a liceo classico, a type of Italian high school that focuses on a classical education. She had a teacher there who conveyed the questions of life in an “exciting and precise” manner. “And I was a bookworm even then,” recalls Valentini. “When I was 16, I read Galileo’s intimidating tome‚ Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, during the Christmas vacation.”

Nevertheless, she decided against studying pure philosophy in the first instance. “I had this awful picture of myself as a 60-year-old: all alone, without family and friends, bent over an Aristotle manuscript in a humid basement library,” she recounts with a chuckle. “So I thought, maybe I should do something more practical.” She chose a degree in political science at the University of Pavia. “In Italy, this degree is highly interdisciplinary: As well as seminars in law, economics, sociology, and anthropology, there were also seminars in political philosophy.” One of them brought her back to the object of her first fascination.

Questions of justice across national borders

There followed a master’s degree in legal and political theory and a doctorate in political philosophy at University College London. In her dissertation and first book, Justice in a Globalized World, Valentini investigated under what conditions questions of justice can be usefully posed across national boundaries. “Do we have a moral obligation as a global society to distribute opportunities and resources more fairly across the planet – or do such duties apply only within politically organized nation states?”

As a postdoc in Princeton, she temporarily did research on the subject of justice toward domestic animals. And after stints in Oxford, Harvard, and the London School of Economics, she investigated topics such as public identity and social empowerment as a fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt, before accepting the offer of a chair at LMU in 2021.

Valentini is currently working on normative powers – such as giving consent, making promises, and exercising authority. She illustrates this to philosophical laypeople with an analogy: “We are all familiar with physical powers, such as my power to move a bottle from one side of my desk to the other. By exercising this power, I create a new empirical state of affairs: The bottle is now on that side.” Equally, we possess the power to create new normative facts – namely, not facts about what is the case, but about what should be or what is permitted to be the case. For example: “Nobody has permission to drink out of my bottle unless I consent. But as soon as I consent, something that was previously forbidden becomes permissible. Or if I make a promise, I create a new obligation for myself to fulfill this promise – an obligation that formerly did not exist.”

In her current work, Valentini is studying the nature of these important but somewhat puzzling powers to intervene in our normative world. For instance: Are these normative powers innate, or do they depend on social practices and institutions? And do these powers retain their effectiveness even when they are employed to morally wrong ends?

The concept of freedom

The topic of freedom is also a recurring motif in her work. Freedom in philosophical discourse, emphasizes Valentini, is not to be understood merely as the absence of external compulsion, but also as independence from arbitrary control. “We can imagine a slave with a very kind master,” she says. “Even if he lets the slave do what he wants – the mere possibility that the master could intervene makes the slave unfree.” What is decisive, then, is not whether someone is actually obstructed – but whether another person has the social power to interfere.

Valentini is developing this perspective together with her colleague and husband, LMU philosopher Christian List. “We’re socially unfree whenever others have the power to interfere in our lives – irrespective of whether they exercise this power or not and whether this power is morally justified or not.” For example, “we should recognize that the power invested in the state to intervene in our lives when we break the law makes us unfree to this extent, even if this unfreedom is morally justified after all.”

Philosophy in the playroom

In addition to concepts like freedom and justice, Valentini also addresses methodological questions in political theory, such as: How can we develop theories of justice that have high normative standards yet are also viable at a practical level? When are idealized models helpful – and when should we instead focus on smaller, but achievable proposals for institutional reform?

As an example, calls for global taxation transparency or fairer trade agreements can be derived from ideal justice models – but will be politically effective only if they consider the real-world power relationships and barriers to implementation. Here again, Valentini pleads for a dual perspective: “You need ideals to have orientation. But you also need analyses that start from real conditions and can benefit the real world.” Theory, according to Valentini, must consciously do both: high normative standards and practical relevance.

In her everyday life with her two little daughters, she also encounters philosophy in eminently practical ways. “In the children’s room, I have to negotiate the fair distribution of toys,” the researcher recounts. “And our three-year-old is in the why-phase: ‘Why do you go to work?’ – ‘Why?’ – ‘Why?’ – ‘Why?’” An endless chain of questions that put every new answer freshly to the test. “But precisely this persistent querying of children, this search for ever deeper reasons, is quintessentially philosophical.”

Supporting female researchers: The Princess Therese of Bavaria Foundation

New Prinzessin Therese von Bayern Chair