The Crisis in Global Ethics and the Future of Global Governance
Fulfilling the Promise of the Earth Charter
Edited by Peter Burdon, Klaus Bosselmann and Kirsten Engel
Edited by Peter Burdon, Klaus Bosselmann and Kirsten Engel
Gary Chartier and Jere L. Fox
Gary Chartier and Jere L. Fox’s chapter examines the relationship between natural law and the state. Contemporary natural law theorists, particularly those working in the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, have tended to view the state as necessary to secure human flourishing. Chartier and Fox seek to undermine this assumption. Natural law theorists, they argue, should deny that the state is necessary or desirable to secure the common good. The authors draw attention to an alternative natural law tradition represented by evolutionary social theorists such as Adam Smith, Lysander Spooner, and Friedrich A. Hayek, arguing that these theorists’ understandings of the basis of social order holds lessons for adherents of the Aristotelian-Thomist outlook. Chartier and Fox begin their chapter by exploring the role of consensual social institutions in securing the common good (understood in a narrow sense as the good of just social order). They then critically assess the influential natural law arguments for state authority offered by Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis, before explaining why non-state norms and institutions should be regarded as a viable route to ensuring social stability.
Jonathan Crowe and Constance Y. Lee
Massimo La Torre, Leone Niglia and Mart Susi
This book’s aim is to take seriously the legal theoretical thesis that the law has a double dimension: a ‘real’ or ‘conventional’ dimension, which is somehow a matter of course and a reflection of the concrete legal practice in the world of facts, and an ‘ideal’ or ‘normative’ dimension, which one finds in the aspi¬rations and claims that accompany that same legal practice and facts. Law is factual, but it is also ideal and/or normative, and this is in the common percep¬tion of citizens and legal practitioners related to a notion of justice. This double dimension of law has been articulated in different ways by several philoso¬phers of law and legal scholars, and has recently found a powerful elaboration in Professor Robert Alexy’s theory of the nature of law. In this book we take as a starting point Professor Alexy’s proposal and at the same time attempt to present an original discussion about law and rights. As a matter of fact it is legal rights and principles that best express what is commonsensically meant by the ideal and normative dimensions of law.