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- Lawrence B. Solum (2009). The Aretaic Turn in American Philosophy of Law. In Francis J. Mootz (ed.), On Philosophy in American Law. Cambridge University Press.
"Natural Justice" develops these claims in four stages. Part I contextualizes the claim that justice is a natural virtue in relationship to Hume's famous argument about deriving ought from is, Moore's open-question argument, and the so-called fact-value distinction. The upshot of the discussion in Part I is the claim that there are no clearly decisive objections to existence of natural ethical facts.
Part II traces the movement from neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics to virtue jurisprudence by articulating a theory of the judicial virtues. Among these are the virtues of practical wisdom and of justice. Practical wisdom or phronesis is best understood on the model of moral vision, which in the context of law is legal vision or situation sense. The virtue of justice is best understood as lawfulness. Just humans are law-abiding or nomimos - in that they internalize the widely shared and deeply held social norms of their social groups. This part concludes with the claim that a legally correct decision is the decision that characteristically would be rendered by a fully virtuous judge under the circumstances of the case.
Part III argues that natural justice can be understood on the model of natural goodness as articulated in the work of Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson. The intuitive idea is that justice as lawfulness is naturally good for reason - using social creatures in human circumstances. This part also articulates and responds to a variety of objections.
Part IV concludes by articulating the sense in which an aretaic theory of law that incorporates a natural virtue of justice as lawfulness can be viewed as an expression of the natural law tradition. The natural law idea that an unjust enactment is not a true law corresponds to two senses in which positive laws can fail to be nomoi (in the technical sense specified by virtue jurisprudence). First, a given enactment may contravene deeply held and widely shared social norms. Second, such enactments may be fundamentally inconsistent with the purpose of law - the promotion of human flourishing.
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