Between the individual and individuals, in dialogue with Massimo Monteduro on rights and duties

Abstract

The contribution deals with a number of issues raised by reading Massimo Monteduro's essay. In
particular, it focuses on the relevance of the administration's task of providing protection to
inviolable rights, asking how far the perspective of functionalisation to rights or even inviolable
rights is able to explain the administration, according to the thesis that sees the administration as a vehicle for guaranteeing people's rights. According to the author, in the constitutional design, the administration would be part of a more general and ambitious project aimed at creating a new society, in which the guarantee of inviolable rights would constitute a sort of precondition, essential but elementary. Again according to the author, the crux of a model of society that tends to ensure general conditions of freedom also through the reciprocal conformation of the positions of individuals with respect to one another, in a context in which the community dimension can never be neglected, would be in the relationship between Article 2 of the Constitution and Article 3 of the Constitution. Therefore, it may be that Article 2 represents the prism of constitutional solidarity, as presupposed in the text, but it does not exhaust it and occupies only a part of it. According to Massimo Monteduro, the person is central, but there are also other people, those of today and those of tomorrow, there is the community. It is therefore necessary to be cautious about the assertion that referring to mandatory duties to persons would have the possible consequence of interpreting them as a numerus clausus, whereas this would not be the case if referring to those duties to public administrations.