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The article is devoted to research of value orientations of civil society in different directions of non classical philosophy. General philosophical theories of interpretation of civil society, continuing strategy of the classics in interpretation of social space on the whole, and civil society in particular, create their liberal and positivism versions.
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This paper explores the possibility of defining the principle of philosophy of right as a concept of legitimacy. By legitimacy is not meant the principle of legitimisation of political government. Legitimacy, in philosophical context, can be expressed as unique corpus of fundamental notions of justice and freedom, on which every concept of right must rest, and only then also every political system that aims for recognition. Legitimacy cannot be drawn from legality, but very concept of right – as an order of agency which stands in unity with and differs itself from other orders of agency – must be derived from the concept of legitimacy. Historically expressed through concepts of justice and freedom, principle of legitimacy allows us to determine immanent logic of praxis and by that also of praxis of right.
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What we understand as the logic of Hegel’s philosophy of right refers on the one hand to (1) the idea of the good=the practical idea=action, an act as a practice. On the other hand, it refers to (2) the method, i.e. the absolute idea which, according to Hegel, realizes the practical idea in a true way. Without a more direct insight in the phenomenological and logical path of consciousness to the absolute knowledge and absolute idea, we will demonstrate that for Hegel philosophy of right does not have his “own” practical method. The practical idea, on the contrary, could be defined by the absolute idea, so that for Hegel the absolute idea is the method of the philosophy of right.
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Article interprets Ivan Mažuranić’s The Death of Smail-Aga in the context of post-revolutionary practices declaring that political freedom is the universal right and purpose of every society and government. Seen in this way, it is possible to establish a direct nexus between Mažuranić’s literary, publicist, political and juridical engagement. His literary work, as well as his legal and educational reforms, are based on understanding the importance of revolutionary statement that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity should govern political life and important social decisions. The Death of Smail-Aga therefore exceeds its main referentiality, i.e. its connection with the real historical case, and, as an allegory, it emphasizes the modernist idea that historical processes inevitably overturn every form of despotism. Advocating natural law as the ultimate principle of every government, Mažuranić at the same time justifies revolutionary terror as the articulation of “divine violence” (die göttliche Gewalt), as Walter Benjamin would later call it, which, free of every individual interest, “pure and immediate”, becomes effective without the need to realize personal revenge or individual idea of justice.
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The problem of natural law is analysed in creation of thinkers of New time of Thomas Hobbes and Benedictus Spinoza. Grounded prominent role of idea of absolute law in forming of their philosophical doctrines. The phenomenon of "nature of man" and his intercommunication is considered with a right and law. The role of absolute law is investigational in forming of the legal state.
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Central among the many obscurities that attend the rule of law are those named in the title of the article. The first part contains some preliminary remarks and attempt to answer the first question. This attempt is based on distinguishing two ways of understanding what rule of law is. By the first way rule of law is a theological concept, i.e. to know what it is we have to know its aims and by the second, anatomical one, the most important thing to understand it are rules and institutions that are usually conceived as its part. The author holds a position that only the first way is appropriate and gives his own interpretation of aims of rule of law. This aim is legal reduction of the possibility of arbitrary exercise of power that is connected with four important reductions – of domination, of fear, of indignity, and of confusion.
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The law as a border concerns both acts of man and the power and a territory of a state. The law as a border is a social institution more sophisticated than it seems to be in traditional concept of legal positivism and Austin’s point of view. In the state law there are many borders (in criminal law, civil law, administrative law, procedural law relating to terms, freedoms and rights, obligations, going to court, and on the other hand, competences/authorities of public offices etc.). In a narrow sense the law as a border is the state law, which establishes borders of human act and behavior through the sphere of legally allowed, forbidden and ordered acts creating institutionalized legal sanctions for the break of the border and non-respect for legal norms. In a wide sense the law as a border is also mine – „my” law, “internal” law (Petrazycki’s psychological theory of law), making one’s the rules of behavior and relating to the state law (the law as a border in a narrow sense) in many ways. Customary law (also religious law) and international law are very specific branches of the law. I maintain that the law as a border must be supported by other normative systems such as morality, religion etc.
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What is usually acknowledged as a topicality indication of Gustav Radbruch’s legal philosophy is the theoretical interest in and practical application of his ideas – known as the Radbruch’s formula – on abominable law, statutory non-law and the refusal to apply it by public authorities, the judiciary in particular. The article main argument is that we can point to other than Radbruch’s formula elements in his philosophy of law which are still applicable and present in the recent discussion on the concept of law itself, its validity and application. What this means is basic to Radbruch’s thought the distinction between the concept of law (Rechtsbegriff), the idea of law (Rechtsidee) and the relationship between the two. The solution accepted by Radbruch in this matter is very broadly applied by the representatives of the nonpositivist concept of law. However, the solution may be ascribed a more general meaning, which manifests itself in the ‘claim to correctness problem’ (Anspruch auf Richtigkeit). Such a claim has to be an element not only of law itself but also of all legal statements including acts of applying the law. The point I endeavour to defend is that out of the three interpretations of the claim to correctness problem, the one which refers not only to the correctness of legal order and law application acts, but also to lawyers’ professional obligations and responsibility is the best justified. This is because such a view most fully addresses the challenges of modern law, which has become increasingly professional in character, but on the other hand more prone to factors typical to fully professionalised walks of life – to critical factors especially. The question of how much the interpretation is compatible with Radbruch’s perspective, is beyond the scope of this analysis. However, some arguments suggesting higher degree of concordance will be presented.
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In the present paper, I argue against the claim that ex aequo and bono adjudication cannot be epistemically objective. I start with a survey of legal rules allowing the parties to resort to ex aequo et bono adjudication. Next, I argue that decisions taken on ex aequo et bono basis are not subjective for three main reasons. First, they are analogous to decision making in hard cases. Second, theories of practical reasoning and hybrid expressivism provide a precise theoretical account of the mechanisms at stake. Third, the context of adjudication provides substantial constraints on judicial tasks.
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The concept of promise may be very interesting for legal theorists, especially contract law theorists. The article aims to briefly discuss the issue of promises in contemporary analytic philosophy and show some of its possible applications in legal theory. Three basic approaches will be distinguished: the contract as a promise paradigm (in C. Fried’s formulation) and two ways of its critique: formal and material. The contract as a promise paradigm will be rejected as incapable of coping with, among others, the so-called autonomy paradox. Arguments of formally-affected critics will be recognized as basically correct but impossible to be fully accepted because of their formalism. Some propositions of the material critique will be deemed the most promising, despite their incompleteness and numerous errors.
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The paper analyzes whether human nature can be the foundation of human rights. To this end, in the first part, the concept of the nature of an object is considered. The author considers three understandings of the concept “nature of X”: (1) the set of necessary (or essential) properties of all X-es, (2) ideal or pattern, which X-es can or should strive to and (3) a statistically dominant tendency (or tendencies) characterizing all X-es as a genre although not always characterizing every individual X. The J. Wroblewski’s idea of distinguishing factual, ethical and logical understanding of nature is introduced. These understandings are then analyzed, especially when it comes to the question of whether they are descriptive or normative, In the second part, each of the accounts is applied to considerations of human nature. Next, the author considers whether any of these conceptions of human nature can be recognized as the foundation of human rights. In the following part, the author examines the concept of ‘human dignity’ and its relation to human nature. Finally, the paper shows which understandings of human nature can entail human rights.
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In order to make a legal text more flexible, the lawmaker is enacting in its content the vague predicates. Provisions with such predicates are applied by the courts that are forming their content in every specific case depending on the case facts. This paper’s purpose is to explain an issue of the vagueness, point out and compare the varieties of vagueness in legal texts specified by A. Marmor and T. Gizbert-Studnicki and at last try to apply law’s vague predicates – anchored and not anchored in definite numbers – to the sorites paradox which is immanently associated with the vagueness phenomena.
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The aim of the article is to critically characterize the new, interdisciplinary research program on morality: universal moral grammar, and to describe its meaning for jurisprudence. Its proponents, such as John Mikhail and Marc Hauser, refer to John Rawls’ linguistic analogy, i.e. comparison of morality to language and suggestion to study it similarly to Noam Chomsky’s generative linguistics paradigm. According to moral grammarians morality, like language, settles on innate, universal cognitive capacities, common to all people. Some evidence supporting these claim, come from various scientific disciplines, such as developmental psychology, neuroscience, anthropology or logic, but they are criticised as weak and inconclusive. The article tries to assess to what extent the linguistic analogy is accurate and useful, analyzing some of the most important N. Chomsky’s claims and their adaptations to the systems of social norms, such as morality and law. The first argument is so called poverty of the stimulus, assuming that the classic learning mechanisms cannot explain the phenomenon of acquisition of language and morals. Other elements of N. Chomsky’s theories adapted to analyze morality include characterizing morality as a system of principles and parameters, divisions between I-morality/E-morality and competence/performance, and also an assumption that the specialized mental module for it exists. Research conducted in universal moral grammar program may have substantial influence on jurisprudence. Firstly, assumptions made by moral grammarians can be seen as a construction of a modern, naturalized theory of natural law, based on empirical study. Moreover, the goal of the program is to fully describe concepts such as guilt, act, obligation or damage, and as an effect to schematize it as an advanced deontic logic, and also to discover sources of intuitions regarding them not only through research on their biopsychological foundations, but also through legal anthropology and comparative legal studies.
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In the present paper, I attempt to answer three questions. First, whether the classical Gricean version of the implicature theory can be applied to describe legal discourse. Second, I provide an outline of one of the most popular theories of the pragmatics of legal language. Namely, Andrei Marmor’s theory of strategic speech. Strategic speech occurs mostly in indeterminate contexts, which contain elements that license even contradictory pragmatic inferences. Next, I attempt to flesh out the problematic points of this account. Third, I attempt to formulate a descriptive model of the strategic selectivity of pragmatic elements in the law, that could face the objections to Marmor’s ideas.
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In this paper, the author has undertaken an attempt to adjust Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s conception of analogy to the province of law. He thus sketches out a pertinent scheme of legal analogy based upon the similarity of proportions and indulges in a consideration of the merits and demerits of such a proposition. To this aim, as the proportions that are compared in such an account of analogy, the relations between the facts of the cases and their legal outcomes were chosen: one such outcome already known and one tentatively posited. Finally, however, the author’s analyses lead to the conclusion that despite its considerable theoretical attractiveness and some mystical charm, legal analogy consisting of the comparison of two proportions is either quite similar to orthodox approaches to analogical reasoning in law or too obscure for one to employ it credibly in the legal setting. In consequence, until its proponents have elucidated the workings of proportional analogy in more detail, the potential use of such a form of analogy in the province of law does not seem promising and cannot be recommended.
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Codes of legal ethics encounter constant waves of criticism. It is pointed out that their disadvantage is, on the one hand, the excessive casuistry, limiting the possibility of taking independent decisions in cases of ethical and professional conflicts, and, on the other hand, the exaggerated declarative character of perfectionist ethical and professional virtues. The gap between the abovementioned perspectives, easily perceived in such codes, results in a dysfunctionality of professional ethics in the actions undertaken by members of the legal profession. The article, apart from the critical-comparative part, includes a proposal of reading and interpreting the content of the codes in a way that transgresses the above opposition. The theoretical basis of the presented position is provided by the concept of “little ethics” formulated by Paul Ricoeur in his work Oneself as Another. The ethical theory developed by Ricoeur combines the elements of Aristotelian ethics of virtues with Kantian ethics of duty. For this reason, it sets a uniform perspective for opposing elements, namely: subordination to the norm of the code and pursuit of ethical and professional self-improvement by legal professionals. The proposed solution belongs to the “reflexive” paradigm of the lawyer’s professional ethics proposed on the basis of Ricoeur’s onto-ethical theory.
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The main task which I pose for myself is to indicate the philosophical roots of the dialogical concept of law. First and foremost, I would like to present dialogue in the context of ancient Greek philosophy and in the context of the classicists of the philosophy of dialogue. Furthermore, I seek phenomenological bases for constructing the dialogical concept of law. The phenomenological method, starting with its classical Husserlian form, has undergone many changes. Thanks to the indication of new horizons of phenomenology by Emmanuel Levinas, discovering dialogical consciousness and the subject constituted in being with the Other are possible. The reference point of reflections on the concept of law is the relationship with the Other as an ethical relationship. Philosophy of dialogue is a certain possible prism of thinking about the social, public, and institutional space. It is thinking through the prism of dialogue (speaking), but also through the third who contributes discourse relevant to what is said. Law as the third, as the mediating element, is a co-constituting element of the entire legal world.
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The paper examines the concept of social rights from both the analytical and philosophical perspective. In the first part of the paper a distinction is made between social rights in the strict sense (called in the paper “Type 1 social rights”), which can be decomposed into the Hohfeldian incidents, and social rights which resemble norm-goals and therefore cannot be decomposed into the Hohfeldian incidents (these rights are called in the paper “Type 2 social rights”). It is argued that even though Type 1 social rights are rights in the strict sense, they exhibit certain idiosyncrasies distinguishing them from “classical” rights, among which the most striking idiosyncrasy is their double correlation to duties. The second, philosophical part presents various ways in which social rights can be justified. A special emphasis is laid on the justification appealing to the concept of autonomy. Some standard criticisms of social rights are also evaluated.
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