RISULTATI RICERCA

After the due thaumázein about the ability of certain cosmic brains present in the meeting on law, morals and religion whose proceedings are collected in this volume to transform physical vibrations into intellectual meanings, the three objects of the symposium law, morals and religion are studied synoptically by the author on two levels of facts and truths. Mention is made among the facts of law of the probable leading role in the formation of rules for the global human environment bereft of planetary legislators and judges of the law of doctrinal origin (Juristenrecht), already a primary source in the great traditional legal systems; while mention is made of the normative ideal of pleromatic law on the level of truths. Among the facts of morals, mention is made of the hegemony of possessive individualism; the tension between the identifying morals of cultural communities and the personal morals of their members; the relative systematic moral automatisms and problematic morals; and the explosion of special morals and personal morals. On the side of truths, the article stresses the irrelevance of God for ethics and criticises possessive individualism both from an anthropological and from a systemic standpoint. It appears to be possible to summarise the facts of religion with three formulae: secularisation; neo-fundamentalisms; the supermarket of the sacred. On the side of truths, the article ascertains the loss of explanatory-theoretical, thaumaturgic-practical and axiological value suffered by religions with the advent of modern realistic thought, approves an apophatic approach to the latter problems and proposes a non-reductive hypothesis of secular mysticism.

The aim of this article is to analyse the intercultural dynamics developing in the religious field in a Europe affected by processes of migration, in the general framework drawn by the crisis of legal instruments. In the first instance, the demise of the secular state and the aggravation of intercultural tensions is leading to the radicalisation of religious conflicts, to sectarianism and to prevarication. In the second instance, the crisis of the welfare state and the increasingly irrational attitude of legal instruments is depriving many rights of the possibility of being correctly safeguarded and removing legal instruments from their natural function of mediation. As a result, there is both a rise in conflicts about religiously significant contents and a situation in which the official religion is adopting a prevaricating stance vis-à-vis lesser religions. Against this background, the article analyses certain aspects of the cultural transformations taking place, both in the cultural framework of the migrants, where there is an increasing trend towards secularisation, and in that of the natives, where there is a rise in ambivalence, opportunism and more or less developed forms of racism. All this tends to produce a complex fabric of disgregating and conflictual interactions, whose prospective developments are extremely uncertain. The hypothesis of a possible positive development of this state of affairs is focused on the relationship between the consolidation of better living conditions and a more effective safeguarding of rights for all, immigrants included, together with a possible cultural change in the sense of a general process of secularisation. The article argues that the close relationship in this perspective between freedom from economic need, legal freedom and religious freedom underlies the virtuous process that, by influencing both the labour market and the conditions of human existence, cannot fail to lead to easier cohabitation between different cultures, but also to greater freedom and real choice in religious affairs.

This article considers the apparent contradiction between the secularisation of private life and the way in which the public life in a certain number of European countries currently seems to feature a return to religious confession. A brief description is given of the theses propounded by the theorists of religious economy, who maintain that the near future will witness the prevalence of religious groups with a strong, rigorous identity, which puts them in opposition to those who identify the future of Christianity with its transformation into a sort of civil religion of the Europeans. The concluding part of the essay looks at the various different scenarios of ecclesiastic policy that may derive from the two different perspectives.

In order to explain some relevant features of major contemporary companies, we need concepts which are usually employed in the study of religion. Moving from a renowned view espoused by Emile Durkheim, Professor Azzoni suggests that since big companies are subjects of general social relevance, they also develop religious practices and values. As a living case of corporate religion, the article analyses the Johnson & Johnson’s Credo and suggests that it is the ground of the invention of a tradition. It also deals with the development of the Credo and the complex history of its influence (Wirkungsgeschichte). In the last section, the author examines the normative force of the Credo, by analysing the managerial decisions of Johnson & Johnson and American case law.

This article analyses the implications of a pluralist ethical orientation towards law and fundamental rights with regard to questions of bioethics and to discrimination based on sexual orientation. In a discussion of the tasks incumbent upon the secular state in a society whose distinctive trait is a plurality of moral options, the authors argue in favour of the state’s duty to guarantee pluralism and to repress cases of integralism that expose to risk the fundamental rights of the individual guaranteed by the Constitution, which is understood to be state morals. On this basis, the article then discusses the attitude that the law should adopt with regard to those questions of bioethics that involve individual moral choices and with regard to same-sex unions, concluding that the duty of the state is to guarantee the freedom of individual behaviours that comply with individual moral choices when those behaviours do not conflict with the interests of the community or with the fundamental rights of other individuals.

The author analyses three social areas in which she believes that there is a shift taking place from the level of legal regulation to that of moral regulation. She argues that this shift is connected to the crisis of politics, to the hegemony of a public debate that preaches the individualisation and privatisation of community affairs and to the disappearance from the public scene of the topics of inequality and of power. The three areas analysed are procreation and sexuality, the approach to criminal law and human rights. The first area is influenced significantly especially in Italy by religious standards, as opposed to the principle of secularly inspired legislation aimed at protecting and guaranteeing recent female freedoms. The second has become the terrain for experimenting with projects of informal justice: what is examined here is in particular the rhetoric used to justify penal mediation. This rhetoric puts the accent on confession and repentance as the way of tackling both the problem of recidivism and the expectations of victims. The third is the use made these days of the language of human rights, whose meaning is all too often warped to indicate a private, moral-based form of benevolence, or also to justify armed interventions and wars.

Written against the historical backdrop of the thoroughly Italian conflict between the Catholic Church and Freemasonry, this article tackles the topic of freedom of thought. Freemasonry puts the individual in the centre of its thinking and gives him the right of self-determination, i.e. it gives him autonomous capacities. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, draws clear borderlines between orthodoxy and heresy, then condemns the latter. The historical conflict between these two organisms has thus been based on the presumptions of truth advanced by the Catholic Church, as opposed to the individual’s freedom of thought propounded by the Freemasons. As the evidence of history shows only too clearly, there is indeed in the author’s view a very short step from the declaration of the concept of heresy to its violent repression, by means of Crusades, the tribunals of the Inquisition, censorship, the Index and so on. The philosophy of the Catholic Church contains a perilous germ that encourages the birth and development of intolerance: the concept of revealed truth. If this truth makes its way into the world of men at a given moment in history and excludes all other truths, then anyone who stands against it automatically finds himself in the wrong, so may legitimately be admonished, judged negatively, condemned and even killed. In the course of history, this antagonism and incompatibility have left a long trail of blood at the door of the Catholic Church, which only very recently, in the second half of the twentieth century, attempted to make up for lost time, adopting such concepts as human rights as if they were its own. Such overdue repentance appears to the author as instrumental and hardly reliable if not supported by an adequate, coherent and credible conceptual apparatus.

What are the premises that genetics is capable of maintaining? What threats deriving against which defences need to be constructed, making use of legal tools, among other things? By clarifying the practical fallout deriving from the knowledge acquired in the field of genetics in recent years, in particular the human genome mapping project, the author highlights how genetics offers authority neither to postulate that all diseases may be vanquished within a handful of years, nor to fear that there is a concrete risk of living in a society of genetically manipulated human beings. There is rather a risk deriving from the availability of a large amount of genetic information, related to the diffusion of increasingly accessible tests that ascertain an individual’s genetic predisposition to develop a given illness or certain behavioural features. Discriminatory policies have in fact already been put into place in some cases especially in the areas of insurance and employment on the weak foundations of the statistical probabilities of genetic profiles calculated on the basis of predictive tests. Moreover, a new lease of life has been acquired by the deterministic conception already used towards the end of the nineteenth century by the Positive Criminal School to justify the preventive restriction of personal freedom. After stressing that every intervention of lawmaking with regard to genetic information implies the need to make critical value judgements, the author highlights the fact and adds her own positive appraisal that the interventions of lawmaking in this field on both national and international level for which information is available have identified individual freedom as the priority value deserving of suitable legal safeguards, thus supporting the pluralist ethical perspective that has no room for any form of subordination of individuals and their choices to any claims of supposed moral superiority, not even of a social moral centred on the public weal and social defence.