Claudio Corradetti

Cultural Relativism and Cosmopolitanism of Human Rights

The aim of the paper is to criticize the notion of partial and total incommensurability between cultures as in terms of conceptual inaccessibility. This will be done on the basis of the principle of translatability. It is argued that all the cultural differences are to be understood within a common system of coordination and that, therefore, it is rather the case of conceiving the notion of cultural diversity in terms of cultural pluralism. If this is so, then whatever values we decide to give one another, they can be conceived as the result of an internal cultural interpretative route according to a normative bootstrap, without there being an impossibility, in principle, of converging on a common set of principles. This perspective reinterprets the rawlsian notion of public reason in terms of an internal comprehensive path of justification of public principles that is only the precondition for a justification following the principles of public reason.