The Political Morality of the Late Scholastics

Author(s):  
Daniel Schwartz
2007 ◽  
Vol 33 (S1) ◽  
pp. 151-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD DEVETAK

ABSTRACTImmanuel Kant and Samuel Pufendorf were both exercised by the relationship between politics, morality and lawful authority; a relationship that goes to the heart of the sovereign state’s existence and legitimacy. However, while Kant defended the authority of the moral law, believing morality provides higher authoritative norms than the sovereign state, Pufendorf defends the political morality of authority, believing the sovereign state should submit to no higher moral norms. The rivalry between these two positions is reprised in current debate between cosmopolitanism and statism over humanitarian intervention. Arguing against statism, this article defends a Habermasian-style critical international theory which affords a ‘cosmopolitanism without imperialism’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
T R S Allan

Abstract: The article explores Dworkin’s suggestion that law and morality comprise a unified normative domain, considering similar suggestions by Greenberg and Hershovitz. It defends an interpretative approach to law, akin to Dworkin’s, against the view that the law’s content is determined by direct appeal to political morality at large, subject only to the effect of action by law-making institutions. Legal practice and political principle are in important ways interdependent, each capable of illuminating and clarifying the other. As an approximation of justice, grounded in practice, the law consists fundamentally in the moral principles that, in the final analysis, constitute the political community. The law’s content is an interpretative question, dependent on a grasp of practice that gives determinate shape to abstract concepts of equality and justice.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-318
Author(s):  
Nicola Lacey

Abstract In his latest monograph, The Realm of Criminal Law, Antony Duff gives us a further, magisterial statement of the vision of criminal law, its procedural framework, and its sanctioning system, which he has been developing over the past 35 years. This is Duff’s own book-length contribution to the tremendously fruitful collaborative Criminalization project. That project has already generated four edited volumes (Duff et al. in The boundaries of the criminal law, 2010; The structures of the criminal law, 2011; The constitution of the criminal law, 2013; Criminalization: the political morality of the criminal law, 2014) and two fine monographs by Farmer (Making the modern criminal law: criminalization and civil order, 2016) and Tadros (Wrongs and crimes, 2016; see also Tadros in The ends of harm: the moral foundations of criminal law, 2011). It will shape the field for decades to come; and it has decisively laid to rest a longstanding puzzle about why, within criminal law theory, the principles underlying criminalisation had received relatively little attention as compared with those underlying, most obviously, criminal responsibility (cf. Lacey in Frontiers of criminality, 1995).


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