МУЛТИКУЛТУРАЛИЗАМ И МОДЕРНО ПРАВО
MULTICULTURALISM AND MODERN LAW

Author(s): Slobodan Divjak
Subject(s): Law, Constitution, Jurisprudence, Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Inter-Ethnic Relations, Ethnic Minorities Studies
Published by: Институт друштвених наука
Keywords: multiculturalism; modern law; etnocultural identity
Summary/Abstract: In this text the author argues that the essential characteristic of muliticulturalism is in its insisting on the internal relation between the normative order of each community and its particular culture. Hence multiculturalism is, in its essence, antiuniversalistic contextualism. This antiuniversal contextualism draws on a single source: the view that persons develop their self-understanding, their conceptions of the good and the just, and their capacity for normative judgment solely in contexts of a particular cultural tradition. For muliticulturalists the conceptions of person, morality and reason cannot be separated from the substantive horizons of a form of life, an ethos. In the author’s view, muliticulturalism is incompatible with the modern law because that law is pure formal and universal one. In the multicultural view, there cannot be a neutral or impartial morality, law and reason because a particular cultural tradition precedes them. Hence muliticulturalism is the critique of deontological theories of justice. It argue that it is an illusion to suppose that there is some neutral standing ground, some locus for rationality as such, which can afford rational resources sufficient for enquiry independent of all traditions. Multiculturalists reject the Kantian claim of an a priory status for reason – the idea that it is possible to adopt a reflective position prior to very traditions. In moderate forms of multiculturalism is laid a seed of the radical antiuniversalistic contextualism.

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