The Coercion Thesis and the Content Problem of Legal Normativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-202
Author(s):  
Kenneth Einar Himma
Keyword(s):  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Conceptual Truth ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
First Order ◽  
Motivating Reasons ◽  
The Status ◽  
Different Content ◽  
Legal Normativity ◽  
In Virtue Of

Chapter 8 addresses the Content Problem of Legal Normativity, arguing that the content of the only first-order motivating reason to which the practices constituting something as a system of law are reasonably contrived to give rise is an objective motivating reason to obey law as a means of avoiding being subject to coercive sanctions. It rejects one possible solution to the Content Problem, arguing that there is nothing in objective norms of practical rationality that would encourage us, even presumptively, to obey a norm simply because it has the status of law. Since there is nothing else in these practices reasonably contrived to give rise to an objective motivating reason with different content, neither the How Problem nor the Content Problem can be solved without assuming it is a conceptual truth that some mandatory legal norms governing non-official behavior provide objective motivating reasons to comply in virtue of being backed with the threat of a coercive sanction.

The Coercion Thesis and the Order Problem of Legal Normativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-178
Author(s):  
Kenneth Einar Himma
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Order Problem ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Motivating Reasons ◽  
Legal Normativity ◽  
In Virtue Of

Chapter 7 addresses the Order Problem of Legal Normativity, arguing that there is no reason to think that the practices constituting something as a system of law must be reasonably contrived to give rise to objective exclusionary motivating reasons to comply with mandatory legal norms governing non-official behavior. It argues that there are three basic sources of objective motivating reasons and that there is nothing in these constitutive practices reasonably contrived to give rise to objective exclusionary motivating reasons from any of these sources. It then argues that these constitutive practices are equipped to do everything that a legal system can be non-idiosyncratically used to do simply in virtue of providing objective motivating prudential reasons to comply with mandatory legal norms governing non-official behavior; the claim that these constitutive practices can produce objective exclusionary motivating reasons explains nothing about legal normativity that needs to be explained.

The Coercion Thesis and the How Problem of Legal Normativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-154
Author(s):  
Kenneth Einar Himma
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Motivating Reasons ◽  
The Right ◽  
Legal Normativity

Chapter 6 addresses the How Problem of Legal Normativity, arguing that the only practices plausibly thought to be conceptually necessary features of a legal system that are minimally equipped to explain how the practices constituting something as a system of law are reasonably contrived to give rise to the right kind of motivating reasons to comply are those that back mandatory legal norms governing non-official behavior with the threat of a coercive sanction. Apart from the existence of the legal norms authorizing courts to impose coercive sanctions for non-compliance with the relevant mandatory legal norms, there is nothing in the practices constituting something as a system of law with the logical resources to explain law’s conceptual normativity. The Coercion Thesis is essential to vindicating both law’s conceptual normativity and the rationality of adopting systems of law to regulate behavior.

scholarly journals Law’s Humility: The Possibility of Metajurisprudence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Triantafyllos Gkouvas
Keyword(s):  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
First Order ◽  
Slow Pace ◽  
The World ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Foundational Work ◽  
Legal Normativity ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Alternative Idea

This thesis propounds a metatheoretical regimentation of legal claims that can accommodate theoretical disagreement across the board. The solution explored does not question the incommensurability between the descriptive and the normative variants of first-order disputes about the grounds of law. What it targets instead is an unpronounced agnosticism about the possibility of a more inclusive type of metajurisprudential disagreement that does not take for granted either the existence of legal facts—construed either as descriptive or as normative facts about what the law requires—as the trivial truthmakers of propositions of law or their potentially reason-giving properties. On the assumption that the fact that for every legal proposition there is something in the world that makes it true is a premise shared by all legal philosophers but those of an expressivist inclination, an unpronounced, primitive division of opinion occurs as early as one ventures to question that our commitment to the possibility of legal truth logically entails our commitment to entities of a distinctly legal kind. The alternative idea that comes out of the rejection of this entailment will be that part of what could explain the slow pace at which the positivism-antipositivism debate is moving beyond the traditional conceptual jargon of 20th century analytic jurisprudence is the fact that we may have been blind to the possibility that our quest for the ultimate grounds of law could have been taking place under the veil of a narrow understanding of the available options with regard to what could legally exist. In virtue of this reconfiguration the prospect of metajurisprudential disagreement acquires definitive shape. At this higher level of abstraction questions about the perspectival character of legal statements, the constitution of legal authority, the relation of legal truth to reality as well as about the nature of legal grounding and legal normativity become available for meaningful contestation. If there is something that could serve as a leitmotiv for this research proposal is that there is no more apt a byword for what it is to conduct foundational work in legal philosophy than that there is no royal way from semantics to ontology.

What Is an Institution?

2007 ◽  
pp. 5-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Searle
Keyword(s):  
Physical Structure ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Institutional Facts ◽  
Institutional Fact ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Creation ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Typical Point

The author claims that an institution is any collectively accepted system of rules (procedures, practices) that enable us to create institutional facts. These rules typically have the form of X counts as Y in C, where an object, person, or state of affairs X is assigned a special status, the Y status, such that the new status enables the person or object to perform functions that it could not perform solely in virtue of its physical structure, but requires as a necessary condition the assignment of the status. The creation of an institutional fact is, thus, the collective assignment of a status function. The typical point of the creation of institutional facts by assigning status functions is to create deontic powers. So typically when we assign a status function Y to some object or person X we have created a situation in which we accept that a person S who stands in the appropriate relation to X is such that (S has power (S does A)). The whole analysis then gives us a systematic set of relationships between collective intentionality, the assignment of function, the assignment of status functions, constitutive rules, institutional facts, and deontic powers.

Categoricity and the sets

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Button ◽  
Sean Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Set Theory ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Order Logic ◽  
First Order ◽  
The Status ◽  
Second Order Logic ◽  
Philosophy Of Set Theory ◽  
Order Set

In this chapter, the focus shifts from numbers to sets. Again, no first-order set theory can hope to get anywhere near categoricity, but Zermelo famously proved the quasi-categoricity of second-order set theory. As in the previous chapter, we must ask who is entitled to invoke full second-order logic. That question is as subtle as before, and raises the same problem for moderate modelists. However, the quasi-categorical nature of Zermelo's Theorem gives rise to some specific questions concerning the aims of axiomatic set theories. Given the status of Zermelo's Theorem in the philosophy of set theory, we include a stand-alone proof of this theorem. We also prove a similar quasi-categoricity for Scott-Potter set theory, a theory which axiomatises the idea of an arbitrary stage of the iterative hierarchy.

Coercion and the Nature of Law

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Einar Himma
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Existence Condition ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
First Order ◽  
Normative System ◽  
Motivating Reasons

COERCION AND THE NATURE OF LAW argues that it is a conceptually necessary condition for something to count as a system of law according to our conceptual practices that it authorizes the imposition of coercive sanctions for violations of some mandatory norms governing non-official behavior (the Coercion Thesis). The book begins with an explication of the modest approach to conceptual analysis that is deployed throughout. The remainder of the book is concerned to show that an institutional normative system is not reasonably contrived to do anything that law must be able to do for us to make sense of why we adopt systems of law to regulate non-official behavior unless we assume that mandatory norms governing that behavior are backed by the threat of a sovereign; an institutional normative system that satisfies every other plausible existence condition for law is not reasonably contrived to give rise to either objective or subjective first-order motivating reasons to comply with mandatory norms governing non-official behavior unless they are backed by the threat of a coercive sanction. Law’s presumed conceptual normativity can be explained only by the Coercion Thesis.

Reason, Value and Desire

Dialogue ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-335
Author(s):  
Jan Narveson
Keyword(s):  
Current Trend ◽  
Motivating Reasons ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Theory Of Motivation

The general subject of Professor Bond's book, Reason and Value, is, as the title implies, the relation between reason and value, or more precisely the connections between concepts of motivation and value, with reasons as the contested notion in between. Bond offers a thesis that at least appears to go very much against the current trend on these matters. Whereas most recent theorists of note have tied justificatory reasons as well as explanatory reasons to desire, thus holding, in effect, that values are somehow a function of desire, Bond wishes to cut the link between value and desire altogether. The first three chapters are devoted to developing this argument, mainly negatively. He distinguishes between “motivating” and “grounding” (or “justifying”) reasons in the customary way (e.g., Baier distinguishes “explanatory” from “justificatory” reasons to much the same effect'), and argues that “whereas desire or wanting and the reasons tied to it belong to the theory of motivation, where they are central, reason, in the sense of the reason(s) that a person has for or against doing a thing, is tied essentially to value, and the two are not to be confused” (9). “… The existence of grounding reasons (though not of motivating reasons) has no internal or necessary connection with desires of any kind” (37). “… All value is necessarily objective, in the sense that it is never a function of desire (or will); nothing is ever valuable or desirable in virtue of being desired” (84). “Value is not to any extent whatever a function or product of desire” (155).

Gaslighting, First- and Second-Order

Hypatia ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky
Keyword(s):  
Second Order ◽  
First Order ◽  
The World ◽  
In Virtue Of

Abstract In what sense do people doubt their understanding of reality when subject to gaslighting? I suggest that an answer to this question depends on the linguistic order at which a gaslighting exchange takes place. This marks a distinction between first-order and second-order gaslighting. The former occurs when there is disagreement over whether a shared concept applies to some aspect of the world, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities without doubting the accuracy of their concepts. The latter occurs when there is disagreement over which concept should be used in a context, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities in virtue of doubting the accuracy of their concepts. Many cases of second-order gaslighting are unintentional: its occurrence often depends on contingent environmental facts. I end the article by focusing on the distinctive epistemic injustices of second-order gaslighting: (1) metalinguistic deprivation, (2) conceptual obscuration, and (3) perspectival subversion. I show how each reliably has sequelae in terms of psychological and practical control.

scholarly journals NURSE IN THE POLISH HEALTH CARE SYSTEM

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (8) ◽  
pp. 1771-1779
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Paszkowska
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Care System ◽  
Medical Staff ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
The Status ◽  
Medical Order ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Care System

Nurses are the largest group of Polish medical staff. There are currently approximately 230,000 nurses employed in Poland. There is a statutory profession for many years. Nurses provide health services on the basis of a medical order or on their own. As a result of changes in the law, the scope of their professional competences has been increasing for several years, including to independently administer medicines and issue prescriptions. The purpose of the article is to present and analyze legal norms determining the status of a nurse in the Polish health care system. In addition, the definition of the statutory principles of cooperation between doctors and nurses. The analysis shows that changes in law in recent years have significantly influenced the increase in the role of nurses in the health care system and they are also relevant to the practice of the medical profession.

scholarly journals What the Tortoise Said to Achilles: Lewis Carroll’s Paradox in Terms of Hilbert Arithmetic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasil Penchev
Keyword(s):  
Hidden Variables ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Lewis Carroll ◽  
First Order ◽  
Logical Paradox ◽  
Completeness Of Quantum Mechanics ◽  
The One ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
The Liar ◽  
Completeness Theorems

Lewis Carroll, both logician and writer, suggested a logical paradox containing furthermore two connotations (connotations or metaphors are inherent in literature rather than in mathematics or logics). The paradox itself refers to implication demonstrating that an intermediate implication can be always inserted in an implication therefore postponing its ultimate conclusion for the next step and those insertions can be iteratively and indefinitely added ad lib, as if ad infinitum. Both connotations clear up links due to the shared formal structure with other well-known mathematical observations: (1) the paradox of Achilles and the Turtle; (2) the transitivity of the relation of equality. Analogically to (1), one can juxtapose the paradox of the Liar (for Lewis Carroll’s paradox) and that of the arrow (for “Achilles and the Turtle”), i.e. a logical paradox, on the one hand, and an aporia of motion, on the other hand, suggesting a shared formal structure of both, which can be called “ontological”, on which basis “motion” studied by physics and “conclusion” studied by logic can be unified being able to bridge logic and physics philosophically in a Hegelian manner: even more, the bridge can be continued to mathematics in virtue of (2), which forces the equality (for its property of transitivity) of any two quantities to be postponed analogically ad lib and ad infinitum. The paper shows that Hilbert arithmetic underlies naturally Lewis Carroll’s paradox admitting at least three interpretations linked to each other by it: mathematical, physical and logical. Thus, it can be considered as both generalization and solution of his paradox therefore naturally unifying the completeness of quantum mechanics (i.e. the absence of hidden variables) and eventual completeness of mathematics as the same and isomorphic to the completeness of propositional logic in relation to set theory as a first-order logic (in the sense of Gödel (1930)’s completeness theorems).

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