Managing Modern Social Conflict through Mixed Ethical Foundations: Deontology, Consequentialism, and Virtue Ethics as Pillars of Salvador Giner’s Republicanism

Abstract: A few years before his death in 2019, Salvador Giner noted the extreme difficulty of durably realizing the “estado precario” of social concord and the relative ease with which societies experience “un estado natural” of discord. So he recalled his decades-long intellectual project of developing a republican political theory that seeks optimal social relations while pessimistically assuming the inevitability of discord. This article argues that Giner’s pessimistic, tragic outlook is evinced through the heterogeneous ethical philosophical theories—deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics—he proposes as guiding principles of republican democracy, theories that must necessarily coexist, though they are ultimately incompatible.