In the Realm of Legal and Moral Philosophy PDF Download

Author: M. Kramer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230377491
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
In this wide-ranging investigation of many prominent issues in contemporary legal, political, and moral philosophy, Matthew Kramer combines penetrating critiques with original theorising as he examines the writings of numerous major theorists (including Ronald Dworkin, H.L.A. Hart, Alan Gewirth, Ronald Coase and Richard Posner). Among the many topics covered by Kramer's essays are the relative merits of legal positivism and natural-law theory, the appropriate understanding of justice, the role of consequences in moral decision-making, and the ultimate foundations of moral judgements.

Author: Judith Jarvis Thomson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674749498
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Thomson provides a systematic theory of human and social rights, elucidating what in general makes an attribution of a right true. This is a major effort to provide a stable foundation for the deeply held belief that we are not mere cogs in a communal machine, but are instead individuals whose private interests are entitled to respect.

Author: Ellen Frankel Paul
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521794602
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The essays in this volume--written by academic lawyers as well as legal and moral philosophers--address some of the most intriguing questions raised by natural law theory and its implications for law, morality, and public policy. Some of the essays explore the implications that natural law theory has for jurisprudence, asking what natural law suggests about the use of legal devices such as constitutions and precedents. Other essays examine the connections between natural law and natural rights.

Author: Barbara H. Fried
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192587099
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Facing Up to Scarcity offers a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in Anglophone moral and political thought over the last fifty years. In these essays Barbara H. Fried examines the leading schools of contemporary nonconsequentialist thought, including Rawlsianism, Kantianism, libertarianism, and social contractarianism. In the realm of moral philosophy, she argues that nonconsequentialist theories grounded in the sanctity of "individual reasons" cannot solve the most important problems taken to be within their domain. Those problems, which arise from irreducible conflicts among legitimate (and often identical) individual interests, can be resolved only through large-scale interpersonal trade-offs of the sort that nonconsequentialism foundationally rejects. In addition to scrutinizing the internal logic of nonconsequentialist thought, Fried considers the disastrous social consequences when nonconsequentialist intuitions are allowed to drive public policy. In the realm of political philosophy, she looks at the treatment of distributive justice in leading nonconsequentialist theories. Here one can design distributive schemes roughly along the lines of the outcomes favoured--but those outcomes are not logically entailed by the normative premises from which they are ostensibly derived, and some are extraordinarily strained interpretations of those premises. Fried concludes, as a result, that contemporary nonconsequentialist political philosophy has to date relied on weak justifications for some very strong conclusions.

Author: Joshua Jowitt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1509947698
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
How does law possess the normative force it requires to direct our actions? This book argues that this seemingly innocuous question is of central importance to the philosophy of law and, by extension, of the very concept of law itself. It advances a position grounded in the secular natural law tradition, and in doing so addresses the two success criteria for this position head on: Firstly, that commitment to the existence of a supreme moral principle is required; Secondly, that any supreme moral principle must be identifiable through human reason. The book argues that these conditions are met by Alan Gewirth's Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), which – through a dialectically necessary argument – locates the existence of universally applicable moral norms in the concept of agency. Given the very purpose of law is to guide action, legal norms must be located in a unified hierarchy of practical reason. It follows that, if law is to succeed in claiming to be capable of guiding our action, moral permissibility with reference to the PGC is a necessary condition of a rule's legal validity. This strong theory of natural law is defended throughout, both against moral sceptics and positions within contemporary legal positivism.

Author: Richard Marshall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190635746
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
What do ethicists and moral philosophers really think about? What are the most pressing concerns in the discipline today? This collection of interviews with a range of interesting and original thinkers in the field provides a snapshot of contemporary ethics in all its complexity and nuance. It contains 26 probing interviews conducted by Richard Marshall of the cultural magazine 3AM, each consisting of a carefully condensed version of the interview, preceded by a brief biography of the interview subject. Marshall's questions are deeply knowledgeable while always accessible to the layperson, and the interviewees respond in kind with rich and opinionated responses. The result is a deeply engaging entrée into the state of ethics today.

Author: Martín Hevia
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400746059
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
If, as John Rawls famously suggests, justice is the first virtue of social institutions, how are we to understand the institution of contract law? This book proposes a Rawlsian theory of contract law. It argues that justice requires that we understand contract rules in terms of the idea of reasonable, terms of interaction – that is, terms that would be accepted by reasonable persons moved by a desire for a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms they accept. On that basis, the book explains the main doctrines of contract law, including those governing third parties, in both the Common Law and the Civil Law.

Author: Mark McBride
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198868863
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
Professor Matthew Kramer is one of the most important legal philosophers of our time - even if the label 'legal philosopher' does not do justice to the breadth of his work. This collection of essays brings together esteemed philosophers, as well as junior scholars, to critically assess Kramer's philosophy. The contributions focus on Kramer's work on legal philosophy, metaethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy. The volume is divided into six parts, each focusing on different aspect of Kramer's work. The first part, Rights and Right-holding, contains five essays addressing Kramer's work on rights and right-holding, including the Hohfeldian analysis and the interest theory of right-holding. The four essays in the second part, General Jurisprudence, focus on Kramer's work in general jurisprudence, from the compatibility of legal positivism with universal legal error, to his robust defense of inclusive legal positivism, concluding with reflections on his writings on the rule of law. The third part, General Matters of Ethics, contains two essays addressing Kramer's metaethical work on moral realism as a moral doctrine. The fourth and fifth parts, Freedom and Liberalism, have four essays falling within political philosophy, probing Kramer's work on negative freedom and political liberalism, respectively. The sixth part, Applied Ethics, contains two essays on Kramer's work on capital punishment and freedom of expression. The collection is rounded off by reflections on, and replies to, the contributions by Kramer himself.

Author: Sacha Golob
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108206107
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
With fifty-four chapters charting the development of moral philosophy in the Western world, this volume examines the key thinkers and texts and their influence on the history of moral thought from the pre-Socratics to the present day. Topics including Epicureanism, humanism, Jewish and Arabic thought, perfectionism, pragmatism, idealism and intuitionism are all explored, as are figures including Aristotle, Boethius, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Rawls, as well as numerous key ideas and schools of thought. Chapters are written by leading experts in the field, drawing on the latest research to offer rigorous analysis of the canonical figures and movements of this branch of philosophy. The volume provides a comprehensive yet philosophically advanced resource for students and teachers alike as they approach, and refine their understanding of, the central issues in moral thought.

Author: John Keown
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199675503
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
John Finnis is a pre-eminent legal, moral and political philosopher. This volume contains over 25 essays by leading international scholars of philosophy and law who critically engage with issues at the heart of Finnis's work.