Sebastián Figueroa Rubio

In this text, I aim to link Sellars’s view on intention with a fundamental Hartian insight: that a normative domain cannot be fully understood without considering the perspective of its participants. Following this insight, I delve into how the communal aspects of our intentions can make room for a legal point of view that is distinct from the moral one, thereby opening the door to a defence of the fragmentation thesis. To this end, I first outline some basic issues regarding the connection between intention and practical reason (section II). I then present some ideas about the structure and logic of intentions (section III) in order to advance to a theory of we-intentions that explains the point of view of moral agents (section IV). Finally, following the Kantian spirit of Sellars’s project, I apply this schema to legal agency and indicate the consequences for the discussion addressed in this book (section V).

This open access book introduces the first systematic approach to the debate on the unity or fragmentation of practical reasoning and its profound implications for legal philosophy. Bringing together some of the foremost legal philosophers from the Hispanic-Latin world, the book presents a thoughtful dialogue with the Anglo-American literature, making it of interest to scholars from both cultural traditions. Although the topic is rarely discussed explicitly and systematically, it is pivotal to ongoing debates about legal normativity, the nature of law, legal authority, and the rationale behind legal decisions. This book fills this gap by providing a comprehensive perspective that illuminates the intersections between the philosophy of law and the philosophy of practical reasoning. It analyses law from the perspective of the agent and offers deep insights into critical issues in the field of law. The volume is divided into four parts. The 1st part addresses the question of the nature of reasons and the unity of practical and theoretical reasoning. The 2nd part deals with the question of whether practical reasoning works in a unified or fragmented way. The 3rd section examines the autonomy of legal normativity in relation to morality and other normative domains. In the 4th and concluding section, the authors analyse the implications of the thesis of the unity of practical reason for legal decision-making and the authority of law.

This article examines the application of the ought‐implies‐can principle in the legal domain, especially in the relationship between obligations and responsibility. It addresses the challenge of cases in which an agent cannot do what is required of her, and yet it seems plausible to say that she has an obligation. To deal with these cases, two parallel distinctions are made: between rules of conduct and rules of imputation, and between doings and things done. It is proposed that these distinctions show that the principle operates in two different but complementary ways: as part of prescriptive relations and as part of responsibility practices.

Ascriptivists such as H.L.A. Hart, J.L. Austin, and Joel Feinberg defended a conceptual link between agency and normativity by putting forward the thesis that the attribution of an action is also an attribution of responsibility. This thesis has been heavily criticised for not providing an accurate model of what is signified by action statements and attributions of responsibility. In this chapter, I explore two ways of supporting it philosophically. The first is based on the constitutivist view, developed by Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson, according to which the concept of agency is dependent on the concept of life-form. The second is founded on the Hegelian idea of recognition as part of the human form of life. According to this second idea, recognition shows how the sociality of agency creates the conditions for normativity. It is argued that the sum of both strategies makes it possible to explain some basic normative notions. The result is a weak social constitutivism that shows how the interpersonal meaning of our actions makes us responsible for them and allow us to build the normative landscape.

This article analyses some theses developed by John Gardner that deal with the relations between different concepts of responsibility and how these are useful for understanding the relationships between agency, reasons, and responsibility practises. In the first two sections, the text introduces the Aristotelian view developed by John Gardner, focussing on how he understood the relationships between the concepts of basic responsibility, consequential responsibility and prospective responsibility. Sections III. and IV. then review two challenges that arise from the author's treatment of the concept of basic responsibility. The first is the difficulty of understanding some types of responsibility and the second is how we can make sense of the role of excuses in our responsibility practises. Finally, some philosophical tools that Gardner developed in his last works are presented in order to deal with those challenges. / This is a preprint version.

This work analyzes how the internal point of view, which represents the perspective of the participant in the legal domain, can be understood within a Hartian framework. It critically examines how legal conventionalism has dealt with this issue. In particular, it criticizes the way in which contemporary conventionalists represent the perspective of participants in legal practice on the basis of cognitive mental states. It also criticizes the way in which they understand how the rule of recognition constitutes the practice. To address these problems, a model based on the philosophy of recognition is presented, showing how its historicity and the way it understands conflict may help to represent the participants' perspective from a practical point of view.

The present work deals with the problem that negligence poses for the relationship between agency and responsibility, that is, it is not possible to establish a sharp connection between the agent’s guilty mind and the wrongful situation. A critical examination of the various strategies that attempt to deal with this problem is presented, and an ascriptivist conception of action and responsibility, as well as the distinction between conduct rules and imputation rules, is developed to address the problem. As a result, a complex theory of agency is defended, the distinction between tracing and non-tracing cases is supported, and it is proposed to understand the latter under the social and normative aspects of agency.

Una de las formas más elementales por medio de la cual nos enfrentamos al mundo es buscar responsables por las cosas que llaman nuestra atención. Así, atribuimos a otros o a uno mismo ser el origen de un accidente, de una derrota deportiva o de problemas económicos. A su vez, estamos inclinados a pensar y sentir que dichas atribuciones justifican reprimendas, castigos o alabanzas por lo sucedido. Este libro es una propuesta acerca de cómo dar sentido a estas experiencias y actividades considerando las reflexiones desarrolladas dentro de la filosofía del derecho y de la moral en torno al concepto de responsabilidad. La obra consta de tres partes. En la primera se muestra el ámbito de discusión, presentando un panorama de las actividades y conceptos involucrados. En la segunda, se presentan las bases filosóficas desde las cuales se puede dar sentido y ordenar dichos conceptos, mostrando la existencia de dos concepciones, una intrapersonal y una interpersonal. Por último, el autor toma partido por una concepción interpersonal y propone una forma de reconstruir los procesos de atribución de responsabilidad. Esto supone entender la responsabilidad a partir de interacciones entre personas, que contrasta con la visión dominante en la modernidad que propone entenderla a partir de un individuo abstracto. El presente libro es una invitación a reflexionar, no solo sobre la responsabilidad, sino acerca de conceptos como agencia, acción, personalidad y autoridad, mostrando las consecuencias de una meditación seria sobre el ámbito de lo práctico

Tabla de contenidos 1. Presentación, Editores 2. Elementos para un enfoque pragmatista de la responsabilidad en la obra de G. H. von Wright, Matías Parmigiani 3. La filosofía de von Wright y su utilidad en el derecho penal, María Laura Manrique 4. Norma, acción y deber: el modelo del silogismo práctico, Juan Pablo Mañalich 5. Variedades de lo bueno en el razonamiento judicial, Flavia Carbonell Bellolio 6. El problema de la comprensión de la acción valorativa. Emotivismo y filosofía de la mente en von Wright, Federico José Arena 7. Conflictos prácticos genuinos y racionalidad práctica. Una solución modal, Pau Luque & Alessandro Torza 8. von Wright y las normas de competencia, Alejandro Daniel Calzetta 9. Georg Henrik von Wright: esbozo de su vida y su obra, Daniel González Lagier

Under the hypothesis that every attribution of responsibility rests on the fact that an expectation has been breached, the author proposes to understand expectations as standards adopted by a community to evaluate specific events and allow the members of the community to search for an explanation of the events which breach expectations. After presenting this way of understanding expectations, their relationship with responsibility is analyzed, having in mind the mentioned hypothesis. To close the paper, the relationship between responsibility and expectations is explored as an alternative to the idea that every attribution of responsibility supposes the breach of an obligation, whether moral or legal, by who is held responsible

Bajo la hipótesis de que todo juicio de atribución de responsabilidad supone la defraudación de una expectativa, en el texto se propone comprender a estas últimas como estándares que pueden ser adoptados por los miembros de una comunidad para la evaluación de determinados eventos y que les autorizan a buscar una explicación de los eventos que las defraudan. Después de exponer esa forma de comprender las expectativas, se analiza su relación con la responsabilidad considerando la hipótesis señalada. Por último, se explora la relación entre expectativas y responsabilidad como una alternativa a la idea común de que todo juicio de atribución de responsabilidad supone el quebrantamiento de una obligación, sea jurídica o moral, por parte de quien es responsable.