The place of culture-based reasons in public debates

• Authors: Allen Alvarez
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The question of how society should deal with social conflicts arising from cultural differences persists. Should we adopt an exclusivist approach by excluding reasons based on specific cultural traditions (culture-based reasons) from public debates about social policy, especially because these reasons do not appeal to the public at large? Or should we resort to an inclusivist approach by including reasons based on cultural traditions in public debate to give recognition to the diverse cultural identities of those who practice these traditions? While these two approaches assign different roles to cultural traditions in public debate, both seem to welcome compromise between conflicting parties. This paper reviews contending normative approaches for dealing with conflicts in multicultural societies and explores the place of culture-based reasons in public debates designed to resolve conflicts.

Keywords

EN

culture-based reasons; multicultural conflicts; public debate; liberalism; multiculturalism; discourse ethics; deliberative democracy

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 24
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 232-247

Dates

published

2014-04-01

online

2014-03-29

Contributors

author

Allen Alvarez

• Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/s13374-014-0222-0