Metatheory and Naive Theory

2021 ◽  
pp. 84-109
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Arthur Ripstein

This chapter articulates the Kantian approach to private law. It begins by explaining the aims and ambitions of Kantian legal philosophy more generally and, in particular, introducing the Kantian idea that a particular form of thought is appropriate to a particular domain of inquiry or conduct. The chapter situates the Kantian view within a broad natural law tradition. For the part of that tradition that Immanuel Kant develops, the moral structure of natural law is animated by a conception of personal interaction that is so familiar as to be almost invisible. Despite its centrality to both morality and law, in the absence of legal institutions, this natural law is inadequate to its own principles. It requires legal institutions to render it fully determinate in its application consistent with everyone’s independence. It also requires public institutions of adjudication. The chapter further looks at Kant’s “division” of private rights, distinguishing first between the innate right that everyone has simply in virtue of being human and acquired rights that require an affirmative act to establish them. It then goes through the Kantian division of the titles of private right, situating them in relation to the distinction between persons and things. Finally, the chapter articulates the Kantian account of what might be called the naïve theory of remedies—that is, that the remedy is an imperfect continuation of the right that was violated.


2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-113
Author(s):  
Frederik Stjernfelt
Keyword(s):  

1929 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dickinson

No present political tendency is more marked than the extension of law to cover ever wider fields of conduct. Political scientists and constitutional lawyers have come to recognize that this tendency can be properly assessed only by examining how law operates in contrast and connection with other agencies of order such as custom, ethics, religion, and economic forces. When one wishes to understand the failure of such laws as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act or the Volstead Act to accomplish the results expected of them, or when one wishes to form a judgment of the effects to be anticipated from the operation of a minimumwage law or from the codification of international law, it is important to understand the relation to the other forces which are giving direction to human conduct. There are regularities and patterns of adjustment in human behavior due to other causes than law administered by government; and these regularities not only work at times toward the same, or some of the same, ends which it is sought to attain by law, but at times they form a highly resistant part of the material against which law must work. An effort will be made in this paper to present the problem of law and government as part and parcel of the whole wider problem of social order, beginning with an attempt to understand the nature and operation of what may be called the “non-political” agencies of order. The task is facilitated by the contributions which anthropology has made to our knowledge of primitive peoples, and by the light which psychology has shed on the springs of conduct. We no longer have to rely like Hobbes and Rousseau on a naive theory of human nature or upon a fancy-picture of savage life. The outstanding result of the newer contributions has been to emphasize the central significance of the principle of relativity in the social no less than the physical sciences.


Author(s):  
Andrew J. Latham ◽  
Kristie Miller ◽  
James Norton
Keyword(s):  

1994 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Stroud-Drinkwater
Keyword(s):  

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