Relativismo cultural versus universalismo ético

Abstract

The scope of the analysis is to articulate the pressing and complex question relative subject to the cultural singularities (be they minoritary and/or nationalities inside or not of a State) and the adoption of an ethical perspective that presupposes the acceptance of principles and rules with universal validity. On one side, it is true that today the central problem of ethics is that of justice, that is, of conditions, principles and contents that characterize a just society, as a genuinely universalizable good; on the other hand, there are many peculiar goods typical of the various idiosyncracies and of the various ways of life, derived from beliefs and habits that don't have to be shared universally. If the borders between the duties of justice and the goods of happiness are not so clear and delimited as they could seem, the truth is that values can only be recognized and accomplished within the extent of a private culture; the problem is not of today, but in this turn of century, the globalization phenomenon endows it with a specific resonance; thus, although the question goes back far in the time, romanticism and the philosophies of history gave it also a special acuteness and Hegel’s critics of Kantian ethics modulated the debate with a peculiar pregnancy. In the last decades, the communitarism, in its reiterated critics to liberalism, especially to equalitarian liberalism, puts in question a bundle of priorities of kantian rooting: that of the righyts of the individual, of the “I” over the ends, of the just over the good.. The effort of dilucidation of this problem will start from the judgement that all cultures as such are legitimate, all having the right to the opportunity to put and to control their own colective destiny and the free exercise of their decisions. One has, however, to presuppose the concept of "basic human needs" as axial referral, that it makes tolerance possible in a pluricultural context, whose limits will be the respect for the dignity and self-determination of persons and communities, as the true signs of an ethics of cultures.