Los derechos en broma

This book is based on the realization that the law has been flagrantly and too frequently perverted. It is enough to take a look at the explanatory statements of many of our legislative texts to see that they have become manifestos of political propaganda in which to express high-sounding ideological and partisan commitments. The rhetorical excesses of the preambles to the articles point to the fact that the legislator conceives the recipients of these norms more as toddlers in need of "positive reinforcement" than as autonomous and rational agents. Professor Pablo de Lora argues in this incisive essay that we are going through a crisis of the liberal State in which its nuclear regulatory instrument, the law, has been seriously corrupted. We are immersed in a type of "anti-legalistic" legislation that no longer has the original purpose of expressing the general will and establishing rights and duties with a claim to coherence, abstraction and generality. On the contrary, Rights in Joke analyzes how the degeneration of the law runs parallel to another legal-political pathology: the incessant expansion of the catalog of human rights. Virtually all social demands become the vindication of the guarantee of a right, with the consequent perversion of public debate, collective deliberation and institutional design. De Lora demonstrates that these phenomena are the natural derivative of a perverted moralization of politics that ignores the diversity and reasonable moral pluralism that inhabits our societies. It is no longer assumed that citizens have to be questioned, persuaded, but rather educated. An infantilized exercise of public action that addresses the social problems that contemporary societies face in a Manichean, emotional and simplistic way. This essay analyzes the threats that threaten our enlightened ideals at a time when moral exhibitionism is becoming the primary goal of politics.