Multiculturalism and Obligations: Individual\, Group\, Society\, and State.
MANCEPT Workshops - September 8/10 2014
Convenor: Domenico Melidoro (Center for Ethics and Global Politics\, LUISS
University of Rome)
The debate on multiculturalism\, independently from its placement within
liberalism\, has largely been focused on three main issues: 1) the
possibility of recognizing some rights to people in reason of their
belonging to some sort of groups\; 2) the nature and the limits of admissible
cultural diversity\; 3) the proper attitude of state towards this diversity.
A fundamental\, but often neglected or underdeveloped\, issue concerns the
nature and the limits of the obligations binding individuals to the other
actors involved in the academic and political controversies over
multiculturalism: groups\, state\, and society understood as that social space
between groups and state.
A serious and systematic discussion on the obligations individuals owe to
their group\, society\, and state might have significant consequences on how
the other multicultural issues have to be faced. For instance\, the strength
and the kind of the obligation someone owes to the group to which she
belongs might have direct bearings on how we can account for minority rights
and for the relationship between individual and the state. The more a group
exercise legitimate authority over an individual the more it can constrain
individual behaviour and ask for collective rights. From a completely
different and less multicultural oriented standpoint\, if one aims at denying
any legitimate power to groups\, one could argue that states are the only
legitimate political entities that can bind individuals. Finally\, those
libertarian or anarchical scholars who object to the legitimacy of the state
in favour of the power of the groups have to devote some systematic effort
to work out a convincing theory of the obligations binding individuals to
groups.
Thus\, the connections between traditional multicultural issues and the
theory of obligation represents a research field worthy to be explored both
from political theorists interested in multiculturalism and from those
interested in obligations. A collective work on these questions might enrich
both the communities of scholars.
Professor John Horton (Keele University) will be the keynote speaker of the
workshop. \;