Terms Of Natural Law Research Articles

El disenso axiológico entre realistas y anti realistas científicos

La importancia de los valores epistémicos en la adopción ya sea de la postura realista o de la anti-realista (o empirista) en el ámbito de la filosofía de la ciencia se ilustra con tres debates. Los debates en cuestión son: i) aquel sobre si debemos buscar explicar o no la extraordinariamente baja entropía del universo temprano, ii) el debate sobre si las regularidades nómicas empíricas requieren o no de explicación vía leyes de la naturaleza y iii) el debate entre Clarke y Leibniz sobre la naturaleza del espacio físico. En estos debates los realistas en general priorizan la búsqueda de explicaciones causales y por ende buscan minimizar el número de hechos brutos, mientras que los anti realistas priorizan minimizar el número de entidades científicas inobservables; en tanto que este desacuerdo parece ser irresoluble sin recurrir a la petición de principio, o a la estipulación en favor de una o la otra de estas metas, entonces isostenia, es decir los argumentos en favor de ambas posturas parecen estar equilibrados, parecen ser igualmente convincentes y de esto se sigue la consecuente suspensión del juicio sobre cuál de estas posturas es la objetivamente correcta, así como un voluntarismo epistémico con relación a cuál de estas posturas adoptar.

ТЕОРЕТИКО-ПРАВОВІ АСПЕКТИ ПОНЯТЬ «ЗАСАДА» І «ПРИНЦИП» СУДОЧИНСТВА

It is researched definition of the concepts «principles of judicial proceedings» and «fundamentals of judicial proceedings». It is analysed the legislative consolidation of the concepts being researched. Features of the concepts «fundamental» and «principle» are considered. It is made a distinction between these concepts. There are highlighted sectoral subsystems of the system of principles of judicial proceedings. There are outlined main provisions of the theories of natural and positive law. The authors has proved that identification of the terms fundamental and principle is impossible because they are different in their essence and sphere of regulation. It is concluded that the fundamentals of justice should be considered in terms of natural law as a basis that is enshrined in the basic law and determines the rule- making activities in the field of justice and administration of justice and determines the basic methods and forms of court activity. The principles must be considered as a positive law, which is specified and enshrined in certain procedural legislation and determines the specific form of activity of the participants in the proceedings.

Wifely ‘Affection and Disposition’: Brilliana Harley and Thomas Gataker’s A Wife in Deed (1623)

ABSTRACTThe sermon Thomas Gataker gave at the wedding of Brilliana Conway and Sir Robert Harley in 1623 was published under the title A Wife in Deed (1623). Gataker defines marriage as an affective contract between two agents with responsibilities to one another, and offers practical and generic precepts for conduct. The dedication to Robert Harley honouring Brilliana Harley as a “mirror” of the ideal wife links those ideals, rhetorically at least, to the Harleys. Harley’s extensive extant correspondence (1625–44) allows us to consider the practical day-to-day significance of the sermon’s teachings. The essay reviews letters Harley wrote to her husband in the 1620s, early in the marriage; and in the 1640s, later in the marriage. Throughout she employs a deferential tone. During the 1640s, when civil war raged and her husband was absent, Harley governed the household, sheltered a godly community, and withstood a royalist siege justifying her position in terms of natural law. Gataker’s sermon provides a fresh lens upon the disjunction between the submissive rhetoric of Harley’s marital letters, and the stridency of her defence of Brampton Bryan.

LEGAL STATE IN THE FUNCTION OF DEMOCRATIZATION OF SOCIETY

The work in question intends to point out that the meaning and importance of social and legal state, to theoretically scientific terms, arises as a necessity from the relevance of its social political life in all democratic states, especially as an issue for post-communist countries that still are in the transition process. It is well known that the functio-ning of the legal state with all its attributes, is a key component in the consolidation of the modern democratic state, which should be guided by the principle of rule of law that applies to everyone equally. At the same time, this work attempts to address the key elements of contemporary democratic states, which are interdependent and very important for a functional state that is dedicated to the realization of a society in which the human rights and freedoms will be the first plan on their agenda, both in terms of natural law and in terms of legal positivism as well. This work aims to promote the importance of the democratic rule of law in its contemporary context as a legal and sociological category, which provides the optimal framework for human freedom, their equa-lity in chances of success, the equality in front of the state authorities and the law, but also the state limitation in prevention and in inability of abuse and arbitrariness. Rule of law, must depart and rely on basic human principles of all social values such as law, justice, morality and principles of democracy. The intention of the work lies precisely in proving that without functioning of the legal state we can not be able to build the modern state that is based on a consolidated democracy.

O legado de Kant à filosofia do direito

Este artigo mostra como Kant define de modo intersubjetivo princípios de justiça nos quadros do direito natural não-positivo. A primeira parte mostra como ele atribui ao direito estatuto de ciência; a segunda, a maneira pela qual, a partir dos conceitos de liberdade como autonomia e limitação recíproca, constrói um paradigma de direito. De acordo com este modelo, pode-se, por fim, analisar como Kant estrutura sua Doutrina do direito em direito privado (subdivido em direito das coisas, pessoal e pessoal de modo real) e em direito público (subdivido em direito do Estado, das gentes e cosmopolita).

NATURAL LAW, HISTORY AND POLITICS

The basic philosophical vision and ethical principles of Catholic Natural Law claim universality. Natural Law thinking aspires to objectivity and universality and at the same time is open to the continuing influence from history and politics. The background principles of positive law historically go by the name of Natural Law. Suffering and injustice contribute to a vision both of the structure of human existence and of what we mean by humane law and ethics. When we confront a cultural crisis, Natural Law, looks not to the past but to the future. Few people today talk of the ethical dimensions of social realities in terms of Natural Law. This is true both in the Church and in the State. In bioethics, the principles rooted in the universal structure of human life have to provide direction and regulations on the playing field of contemporary life and medicine. A liberal Catholic perspective tries to keep in play the universal and the particular aspects of Natural Law reasoning.

Dialogue with Dictators: Judicial Resistance in Argentina and Brazil

Throughout the world, judges are often asked to implement the repressive measures of authoritarian rulers. Which conception of legal interpretation and judicial role, if any, make judges more likely to resist such pressures? That question, central to Anglo-American jurisprudence since the Hart-Fuller debate, is addressed by examining recent military rule in Argentina and Brazil. In Argentina, judges were sympathetic to military rule and so criticized its “excesses” in the jurisprudential terms favored by the juntas: positivism and legal realism. Brazilian judges, by contrast, were largely unsympathetic to military rule, and so couched their criticism in terms of natural law, in order to raise larger questions and reach a broader public. Empirical study of the cases and conceptual analysis of existing theories both reveal that no view of legal interpretation inherently disposes its adherents to either accept or repudiate repressive law. Contingent political circumstances—the rulers' favored form of legal rhetoric, and the degree to which judges accept the need for a period of extra-constitutional rule—determine which legal theory fosters most resistance. But since most authoritarian rulers nominally affirm their constitutional predecessors' positive law and are often unwilling to codify publicly their most repressive policies, strict literalism usually offers the most congenial idiom for judicial resistance to such regimes.

Dialogue with Dictators: Judicial Resistance in Argentina and Brazil

Throughout the world, judges are often asked to implement the repressive measures of authoritarian rulers. Which conception of legal interpretation and judicial role, if any, make judges more likely to resist such pressures? That question, central to Anglo-American jurisprudence since the Hart-Fuller debate, is addressed by examining recent military rule in Argentina and Brazil. In Argentina, judges were sympathetic to military rule and so criticized its “excesses” in the jurisprudential terms favored by the juntas: positivism and legal realism. Brazilian judges, by contrast, were largely unsympathetic to military rule, and so couched their criticism in terms of natural law, in order to raise larger questions and reach a broader public. Empirical study of the cases and conceptual analysis of existing theories both reveal that no view of legal interpretation inherently disposes its adherents to either accept or repudiate repressive law. Contingent political circumstances—the rulers' favored form of legal rhetoric, and the degree to which judges accept the need for a period of extra-constitutional rule—determine which legal theory fosters most resistance. But since most authoritarian rulers nominally affirm their constitutional predecessors' positive law and are often unwilling to codify publicly their most repressive policies, strict literalism usually offers the most congenial idiom for judicial resistance to such regimes.

Church and State in the Struggle for Human Rights in Poland

This article focuses on the historical struggle for the realization of human rights in Poland. A focus on historical struggle indicates some congruence with a Marxist concern for praxis, although some of the struggle described opposes given forms of Marxist practices. I shall use philosophical and theological categories in the analysis of the struggle, while seeking to avoid an abstract understanding of human rights. An abstract approach to human rights in terms of natural law or an unmediated ontological relation between God and persons may ground their inalienable character, but contribute little insight into their social actualization. The social reality of Poland is as rich a context for seeking to understand the role of the church in the struggle for human rights as one could hope to find. The role of the Roman Catholic Church in sustaining Polish identity and dignity during its partitions by Austria, Germany, and Russia from 1773 to 1917 provides the foundation for the struggle we shall analyze during the post-World War II period from 1945 to the present. The church's participation in its Communist-governed society during the last four decades, however, shall require our full attention. We shall allude to the earlier history only to help understand the contemporary social power of the Polish church.

Thomistic Natural Right

U NTERPRETERS OF St. Thomas Aquinas's moral and political teaching are confronted with a strange difficulty: The celebrated theorist of natural law ethics manages to write the hundreds of pages of the Summa Theologiae that present his interrelated treatments of natural prudence, natural right (jus naturale), and natural justice without reference to natural law (lex naturalis). He is silent about natural law, even though he had already treated it earlier in the work and so could easily refer the reader to it if he thought that prudence, right, and justice were in some way rooted in natural law and to be understood in terms of it. His silence is still more curious in that many parts of the treatments of prudence, right, and justice proceed in legal terms. This odd silence may be viewed in two ways. The conventional view seems to assume that the grounding of prudence, right, and justice in natural law is so obvious that Thomas does not even need to mention it. The unconventional view that I shall present in this article is that Thomas does not refer to natural law when explaining prudence, right, and justice for the straightforward reason that they are not to be understood in terms of natural law, are not founded on it, and are crucially misunderstood if so viewed. Most radically put, I shall argue that Thomas's moral and political doctrine is not fundamentally a natural law teaching at all, and that in his teaching the morality of natural law is crucially different from (and subordinate to) the morality

Contraception and Conjugal Love

Few arguments in the domain of morality seem as unpersuasive to the great majority of Americans as the customary natural-law arguments against contraception as a frustration of the generative act. Even when, in addition, the individual's lack of total dominion over his species-directed functions is pointed out, most people remain unconvinced. Yet, when there is question of grave and absolute precepts of natural law, one would expect, if not that men would spontaneously recognize their obligations, at least that the well-disposed should acknowledge them when clearly presented. On the other hand, while well aware of this unsatisfactory situation, theologians seem certain of the validity of their arguments. This article is presented in the conviction that the theologians are right, but that the laymen are not wrong: those elements of the argument from natural law most capable of producing strong intellectual and emotional impact would seem, for the most part, to have been left only implicit in the more common presentations. The purpose of this study is to seek out in detail such elements and to render them explicit. It seeks to explore a bit further than usual into that concrete human nature which founds the natural law and to stimulate discussion which may ultimately lead, in more competent hands, to a psychologically more effective position than is now available, a position which will confront men's consciences with both perception and feeling of the evil of contraception. In Part 1 certain relations between man's psychology and the natural law are stressed. Part 2 analyzes human sexual activity in terms of natural law, and the relations of sex to the total person, to other men, and to God are discussed. Part 3 applies the principles developed in Part 2 to the matter of contraception. The basic argumentation is philosophical. But when theology provides an additional insight or useful analogy, we have not hesitated to use it.

Nature and origin of standards of quality

This paper discusses the importance, from the viewpoint of judging quality, of: the end to be served by a standard of quality; the nature of the accepted binding force of the standard upon the acts of those interested in the standard; and the role of the judge of quality in shaping the standard in terms of natural law, authority, specification, custom, and precedent.