CULTURE DEFENCE STRATEGY IN THE CONTEXT OF THE DEBATE OVER MULTICULTURALISM

The main aim of this article is to introduce the concept of culture/cultural defence into the framework of current debates over multiculturalism. Culture defence is a rela-tively new legal strategy, which seeks to strengthen its own position as a formal strategy in criminal law, mainly in the common law system. It is based on the cognitive assump-tion that culture affects individuals’ perception of social reality to that extent that indi-viduals could lack the capacity to act with the full ignorance of culturally given norms. The concept of culture defence will be juxtaposed to the different approaches to multicul-turalism itself: to the concept of John Rawls’s theory of justice, to the concept of politics of difference as introduced by Charles Taylor, and to the politics of multiculturalism proposed by Will Kymlicka. This article reveals the question of legitimacy of culture defence as a crucial question bounded up with political philosophy, not exclusively em-braced by the philosophy of law