Download The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory by Richard A. Posner PDF

By Richard A. Posner

ISBN-10: 0674707710

ISBN-13: 9780674707719

Bold criminal thinkers became mesmerized through ethical philosophy, believing that groovy figures within the philosophical culture carry the keys to realizing and enhancing legislation and justice or even to resolving the main contentious problems with constitutional legislation. they're improper, contends Richard Posner during this booklet. Posner characterizes the present preoccupation with ethical and constitutional concept because the most recent type of felony mystification - an evasion of the true desire of yank legislation, that is for a better knowing of the social, fiscal, and political proof out of which nice criminal controversies come up. In pursuit of that figuring out, Posner advocates a rebuilding of the legislations at the pragmatic foundation of open-minded and systematic empirical inquiry and the rejection of cant and nostalgia - the genuine professionalism foreseen through Holmes a century in the past.

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41. Thus in my book Sex and Reason, note 21 above, I tried to spell out the implications for the regulation of sex of adopting Mill’s political and moral philosophy but disclaimed the possibility of convincing anyone to adopt his philosophy. , ch. 8. the wrong turn 32 which to articulate and reªne your preexisting moral views. You may have been a latent Millian who, until reading about self-regarding acts in On Liberty, could not have articulated your unease at certain forms of government intervention or social censure.

It is indeed “startlingly counterintuitive to think there is nothing wrong with genocide or slavery or torturing a baby for fun”32—in our culture. That’s the rub. The moral dictionary is local. Number theory is the same in every language; and unicorns I suppose have one horn regardless of the language. If “unicorn” were deªned, in deªance of its etymology, as having anywhere from 1 to n horns, depending on the local language group, it would lose its universality; it would be like a moral term. The most serious problem for moral theory in today’s America is not the absence of a mind-independent or otherwise universal or objective 31.

I am doing neither. Consider beauty. A powerful argument can be made that it is relative. Most of us think warthogs ugly, but if warthogs could speak they would tell us that warthogs are beautiful and human beings ugly, and there is no fact to which we and the warthogs could appeal in order to resolve the disagreement. The argument that standards of beauty are relative in this way may be wrong, but it is not self-refuting. If warthogs could speak, they might agree that standards of beauty are relative.

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