Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco

Well-known for his contribution to the juristic world, Professor Ronald Dworkin was an outstanding legal philosopher of his generation. This volume celebrates the thoughts of Ronald Dworkin on dignity. The contributors have critically engaged with different perspectives of Dworkin's thoughts on dignity. The aim is to shed light on juridical and moral contemporary conundrums such as the role of dignity in constitutional contexts in India, and the understanding of dignity as either a foundation of human rights or as a supra value that illuminates other values and rights.

Much controversy has emerged on the demarcation between legal positivism and non-legal positivism with some authors calling for a ban on the -as they see it- nonsensical labelling of legal philosophical debates. We agree with these critics; simplistic labelling cannot replace the work of sophisticated and sound argumentation. In this paper we do not use the term ‘legal positivism’ as a simplistic label but identify a specific position which we consider to be the most appealing and plausible view on legal positivism. This is the view advocated by Gardner in his paper 'Legal Positivism: 5½ Myths’, where he carefully scrutinises the most convincing and unifying postulates of legal positivism, which he calls “the thin view”. The study shows that this thin view presupposes an empirical conception of action that is untenable and implausible since it makes acts of engagement with the law unintelligible to an observer of such acts.

This collection of essays represents a ground-breaking collaboration between moral philosophers, action theorists, lawyers and legal theorists to set a fresh research agenda on agency and responsibility in negligence. The complex phenomenon of responsibility in negligence is analysed from multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives, shedding light on key ethical and legal issues related to agency and negligence to impact substantive law and policy-making in different jurisdictions. The volume introduces new debates and questions old assumptions, inviting the reader to rethink substantive law and practical ethical reflection.

What happens in the agent that enables her to comply with the legal command or directive? When we perform an action because we are complying with the legal command or directive, are we still active, self-governed autonomous agents? In what sense are we still autonomous agents? The task of this study is to explain what legal authority is and the premise of the study is that this question can only be answered through understanding of how legal authority operates upon the agent: if we recognize that legal commands or directives intervene upon, affect and change the agent’s practical reasoning, then we need to understand and explain how this happens.

According to Rodríguez-Blanco, there are many key distinctions that play an important role in mapping out plausible ways of thinking about law construed as a social practice. Among the varied dichotomies the one that has probably been most influential is the distinction between a description of an action and the normative characterisation of an action. The former aims to explain the action without resorting to the values or principles of the agent; the latter aims to show how actions are part of the normative landscape where values, principles and other normative standards play a key role. The focus might be on the values, principles and standards of the agent or on values, principles and standards that are objective. In previous work, Rodríguez-Blanco has defended the view that the primary conception of intentional action is normative all the way through. There is no “brute fact” or “pure facts” about actions and therefore actions cannot primarily be grasped by descriptors of the world either mental, physical or of a similar sort. She has argued that in order to make intentional actions intelligible we need to resort to the values or principles or good-making characteristics that the agent aims to bring about in the world and we need to understand that the values, principles or good-making characteristics of the action provide a unity and intelligibility to the various bodily movements of the agent. This is a complex and occasionally difficult understanding of agency but it is one that, in her view, is sound. The core elements of this account of agency are that (a) there is a parallel between practical reason or deliberative reasoning and intentional action; (b) practical reasoning involves practical knowledge which is non-observational; (c) the error of an action stems not from what the world looks like but from the performance of the agent; and (d) intentional action is primarily from the first person or deliberative point of view and therefore it is forward-looking. In this paper, Rodríguez-Blanco focuses only on (d) and argues that this feature provides the key premise for the conclusion that a characterisation of actions in social practices, including law, cannot be carried out on the basis of descriptions. She first shows that (d) is true and she then advances the best account of actions in terms of descriptions provided by legal philosophers in recent years, which is the idea that actions and the resulting social practices can correctly be grasped as “deep conventions”. Finally, Rodríguez-Blanco shows that conventions sensu stricto and deep conventions require (d) to be intelligible.