RISULTATI RICERCA

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.

In the latest literature, the extensive catalogue of subjective rights has been enriched with a new category, that of the Relational Rights, or Rights of Relation. These rights are mentioned with regard to specific groups, in particular the family, but some authors mention them with regard to every context where interpersonal relationships are developed. It follows that fundamental rights should also be construed as relational rights. The article expounds on the distinctive traits of this category of rights, which has been elaborated primarily by scholars with a feminist orientation in the framework of their work about the ethics of care, then analyses the premises underlying the perspective of relational rights, highlighting in particular their connections with the critique of the individualistic basis of human rights. The author also stresses that this perspective clashes significantly with such doctrines as solidarity and transpersonalism and also with critical thinking about how rights make their way into the vital world. Lastly, she questions the implications of the transposition of relational rights in the framework of the institutional treatment of conflicts, with a specific focus on family and juvenile justice.

Problems like how to put the idea of human rights into practice in societies that violate them or how to defend the weaker individuals in communities existing within multicultural western societies are the source of bitter controversies. One of the most important theoretical problems that influences the possibility of drawing a suitable picture of this kind of questions depends on the indiscriminate use of the notion of fundamental rights with respect to the notion of human rights. The definition of human rights proposed here identifies them as philosophies of what is due to human beings, while fundamental rights are construed as that set of rights that become part of the substantial criteria internal to the norm of recognition of a legal and social system. The functional value and ethical significance of fundamental rights are not the same as those of human rights as abstract philosophies of what, in principle, is deontologically essential to the defence of human beings as such. If human rights are concerned with questions of justice, fundamental rights focus on ethical priorities. This distinction can be used to tackle the political problems related to equality, to safeguarding individuals in multicultural societies and to putting human rights into practice: this relies on the condition that these problems are concerned concretely with questions of system, with regard to which rights can become fundamental and how, in a given social context, and not simply to exporting moral philosophies all over the world.

Should law be conceived of as singular or plural? Globalisation has brought profound changes to the traditional approaches to organising cases of diversity, both social and institutional. Even the theories of federalism and of legal pluralism need updating. Nowadays, global law is pervaded both by the trend towards unification, as in the field of human and fundamental rights, and by the opposite trend towards diversification, which is expressed primarily in the market, especially in contractual instruments. But there is no shortage of paradox and contradiction, both in the former field and in the latter. Even the gradual consolidation of judge-made law, which is replacing legislative macro-decisions on the global scene, seems to be suspended in limbo between unification and differentiation.

This article discusses the social tension provoked by what is known as the new fundamentalisms. In particular, political fundamentalism, market fundamentalism, cultural fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism, which, curiously enough, sometimes unite against the social compact of modernity. The breach of the social compact or commitment brings about a lack of submissiveness of the political power and the of economic power to the law. It is at this point in time that fundamentalist tendencies become more radical in their interpretation of political action and of economic action for example, dogmatic interpretations of democratic procedures or the totalitarian interpretation of the functioning of the capitalist free market, which go to the extreme of equating democracy ideologically with the market or, also, democracy with political and economic neo-liberalism. Moreover, there is a need to consider the increasing interference of religion and its churches in these secular fields, radicalising its religious message and bringing about severe ethical and religious clashes. This in turn reverses the very process of secularisation of the modern Western world, converting it into a new move towards religious confession abroad in the world.

European Union immigration policies are increasingly intent on constructing the notion of the desirable immigrant on the basis of cultural difference, in a sort of differentially-based racism. The legal tools that support these policies justify this discriminatory approach on the basis of the argument that a given cultural difference (linked to the Arabic and/or Islamic community) is a premise for legal and political incompatibility. In this context, it is striking that use is made of the notion of criminal law of the enemy (including the "criminal law of war), whose roots derive from the Nazi theory of the Gemeinschaftsfremde.

This subject can be tackled from either an objective or a subjective viewpoint. In the former sense law, morals and religion are traditionally conceived of as normative systems, with a sense of unity that has now been dissolved by a process of fragmentation the plurality of sources in law and morals, brought about by the multiplication of primary principles that may not always be reciprocally compatible, and trends toward the privatisation of faith in religion. In the latter sense, rights have been multiplied under the pressure of the human rights movement, there has been a rise in sectorial systems of morals that all demand total commitment and, finally, official religions have become so mixed as to generate personal religious conceptions. Relativism is the philosophical kernel common to all such fields of everyday life. The paradox stressed by the author is that, whereas the objective sense of the question leads to relativism, its subjective sense tends to point towards anti-relativism.

Spain, with France, Italy and Portugal was one of the first country to codify the modalities of quality wine productions, trough specific regulations. Nowadays the Spanish viticulture, as happens in the other ones of the Mediterranean Europe, while the areas and the production are decreasing, it is experimenting an increasing of production and consumption of quality wine. This paper analyses the volume of selling on the Spanish market and on the export market, that have in the quality wine a product be able to bear the concurrence of powerful competitors.

Agrofood system in the region of Italy, called Padania, at the times of Ancient Rome derives from the interlacing between Roman and Celtic elements, which were the two populations presents in the area. This study underlines the roman alimentation, underlining the differences in the classes of population: from the riches tables of the nobles, with very rich dishes, to the rations of soldiers, based on grain and meat. The author survey the various foods of animal (meats, fishes, cheese) and vegetal (grains, legumes) origin, cakes and spices, much used at that times.

The percentage of food consumption on the total consumption is decreasing, while on the contrary the percentage that interest the extrahome food consumption is increasing; the judgement of consumers about goods and services of restoration is going to become more and more important, but this judgement is not known verywell. Trough an inquire between tourist, frequenting some quality restaurant of Riccione, are defined some parameters, using ordinal judgement about the restaurant, the menu, the dishes and the service. The analysis of consumers’ judgement take to a clusterization of consumers interwieved in six principal groups.

Genetic engineering applied to agriculture is one of the most controversial field of modern biotechnology. The recent large diffusion of transgenic foods has produced many different national policies and regulatory frameworks. In this paper the Authors stressed particularly the main debate among USA and Ue on GMOs. The different political approaches were examined in terms of international market access, property right, consumers’ concerns and attitudes toward risk assessment. In addition to that the right of the public for a correct information was evaluated. The possibility of fighting hunger problems, still present in many Developing Countries, through the use of transgenic crops was examined as real, potential, strong new tool. Finally, we analysed the opportunity of introduction GMOs in the Italian Agricultural food system.

Italy is rich of success stories where local resources have been used in an intelligent manner, as to favour a lasting development, based on a typical products agriculture, on an intelligent approach to tourism and on the enhancement of local cultures. This paper define such evolution and describes the interventions made by European Union, National Government, Local Entities, private sector and non governmental organizations. Several examples of endogenous and exogenous development are provided, the latter ones based anyhow on the utilization of local resources. The papers first describes the progressive homogenisation of productions and the loss of diversity due to post WWII policies, implemented by the European Union and the Italian Government and then describes the last two decades of European Union interventions, within several initiatives. Consequently, aspects of sustainable development are analysed, like the typical products, the organic farming products, the agro-tourism activities, which are now promoted within the framework of diversification and market segmentation. The main thesis of the Author is that the private initiative, by few innovators, has always lead the way, showing examples that only decades later have became national or European legislation. This was the case for typical products, for agro-tourism and for organic farming. On the other hand, within the existing legal framework, there are wide rooms for improvement and for action, since most farmers and most products still are not certified under any regulation. The Author advocates a stronger link with small and medium scale food processors and with distribution, because these two components of the agro-food chain are also under the attacks of the large international companies. Networking at district level and for agro-food chains appears to be the best solution, to favour synergies among profit oriented operators, non governmental organizations and public entities. Another growing alliance has been established with conscious consumers, who are increasingly aware about relationships between nutrition, health and environment; Italian consumers are searching for better and guaranteed quality and are rediscovering traditional foods and the cultural values of good eating. Consumers associations have already shown their capacities as lobbyists in the food sector and this cooperation should be also enhanced.