Justice depends on the identification of the individuals with their community

Résumé du document

Seyla Benhabib in The Claims of Culture reported the case of a young Laotian American woman abducted from her work at Fresno State University and then raped. Her assailant, a Hmong/Laotian immigrant, argued that among his tribe this behaviour is the customary way to choose a bride. He uses so-called "cultural defence" so that his conduct should be judged according to his own cultural standards, his own norms of the just and unjust. The court indeed seemed to agree in part, deciding of a relatively light sentence. This event is an institutional application of the claim "Justice depends on the identification of the individuals with their community". What has happened to Themis, pointing to the divine norm of Justice, for her daughter Dike, goddess of human law and order, enemy of falsehood, and protector of a wise administration of justice within the human community? Essentially defined as an absolute norm, justice, as relative, sounds like an oxymoron.

Extraits

[...] Communitarian systematic claims forget that the individual's identification is the condition of its existence as a community and fetters him. Making the community the subject of rights is a way to withdraw them form the individual and to determine his exercising of his own rights. Indeed, Kymlicka argues that minority rights are consistent with, and indeed promote the liberal ideal of individual freedom and retains the notion of the individual as the central focus/paradigm of liberalism. Communiatarianism with identity politics pursue an objective shared with republicanism and liberalism: the integration of agents to sustain a common idea of justice. [...]

[...] Philip Pettit even reconciles republicanism and multiculturalism arguing that promoting the non-domination of one individual of a class implies that the whole group beneficiates of its members' liberty accounting for the specific link between them. Rawls himself can be seen as a liberal republican (Bertrand Guillaume): the social ideal of equitable cooperation provides the political community with the value of an intrinsic good common to all citizens and he refers to a reflected equilibrium and reasonableness, which are qualified only in relation to some axiological considerations. [...]

[...] It is made necessary to find one, since community must ultimately remain a free adhesion of the individual which he must be able to reject, as Kymlicka and Taylor stress it. Then, the “universal dignity” is both the justification for politics of difference as for integrationist republicanism or liberalism. Even liberals like Rawls or Berlin do not forget the social thickness of the self as orienting choices and values: “some of my ideas, that I am carrying, within which my feeling of moral and social identity are only intelligible if replaced in a social system of which I am only an element” says Berlin. [...]

[...] In that case, not only the concept and judgment of justice depends on the identification with a community, but also its concrete institutional and political achievement. Society is the place of diversity; politics aim at harmonizing them. Thus, communitarian thought gave birth to multiculturalist's politics: an identity dimension of the group, continued on the public sphere by a claim for recognition, which requires both legal and institutional accounts of it, aiming eventually at a social normative change in the way minorities are considered. [...]

[...] Solving this problem has been the attempt of modern political thought. Deprived of an intrinsic universal reference order, justice has come to mean more precisely social justice: a value, an attribute of social institutions and of a society. If modernity is seen as a process of secularizing politics, questioning absolutes, and discovering the variety of conceptions of the world, it has attempted to extract of the holistic order the free rational man to found on him the principles of justice, independently from his status in society or religion. [...]