Committed to bringing Rawls's innovative thought to Europe, Maffettone begun to be widely known for his active participation in the academic life, earning the merit of having introduced important scientific novelties, especially in the Italian cultural debate.
He has also founded and edited philosophy journals (Notizie di Politeia and Filosofia e Questioni Pubbliche, now Philosophy and Public Issues) and research centers (Politeia, Centro per la Ricerca e lo Studio dei Diritti Umani, Center for Ethics and Global Politics, ETHOS observatory), published scholarly articles on different subjects, and contributed to the public debate on various cultural issues thanks to a wide network of international relationships, participation in seminars, workshops and conferences in Italy and abroad.
Two of his books, Il Valore della Vita (1998), and Etica Pubblica (2001) bridge the gap between applied ethics and political theory, which represents a recurrent theme of Maffettone's philosophical project.
Together with Ronald Dworkin, Maffettone published I Fondamenti del Liberalismo (2008) in which the two authors present their views of liberalism, agreeing in some areas and diverging on others, to begin with the relationship between ethics and politics.
Recently, the most importance evidence of his intellectual achievements can be seen in his book La Pensabilità del Mondo, where he presents an original theory within the field of ethics of international relations.
The same kind of argument was cashed out in two articles in English, one on the European model of “normative regionalism” (published in “The Monist”), the other on global justice (forthcoming in the collective UNESCO volume).
Legitimation, on the other hand, is normally based on an institutional practice, concerns mainly the inputs of a political process, goes bottom- up and does not directly appeal to the moral and metaphysical roots of a culture.
Assuming the fact of pluralism in contemporary liberal-democratic societies, we can have different plausible justifications in reciprocal conflict, but we have to rely on the same institutional legitimation for the sake of stability (for the right reasons).
He was also a Senior Fellow “Ethics and Professions” program at Harvard University, and visiting professor in France (in the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and at Sciences-Po in Paris), as well as in England (LSE) and in India.