Triantafyllos Gkouvas

There is a plethora of occasions where we feel the intuitive urge to say that the fact that one is a participant in some sort of conventional or institutional practice is a reason to abide by its rules because that is just what it is to be a practice participant. This form of prescription-cum-justification argument is a fusion of an appeal to ordinary practical reasons (the prescriptive part) and an appeal to what is known as a constitutive explanation (the justificatory part) of such reasons. The latter explanation is constitutive in the sense that the reason-for complement, namely, the activity of abiding by the rules of is a partial description of what it is to be a practice participant. The author of this essay argues that the use of constitutive arguments for explaining the normativity of conventional requirements is one step ahead of what needs to be accounted for in the first place which is the following: is the normative force of practice-based requirements a matter of practical reasons? The essay’s timid proposal will be to consider the possibility that the normativity of social practices is more akin to the normativity of formal rationality than to the normativity of practical reasons.

In the second section’s final chapter, Triantafyllos Gkouvas discusses the function of interpretative canons in the determination of the law’s content. The argument begins with an overview of the controversies raised by the judicial application of interpretative canons and describes the main distinctions made by jurists in the context of the assessment of their legal effects. Subsequently, Gkouvas explores epistemic and normative approaches to the question of whether interpretive canons have the power to modify the legal effects of ordinary laws or constitutional provisions. He argues that, despite their differences, these approaches take a similarly deflationary position on the role of canons in legal reasoning. In response to this deflationism about the role of interpretative canons, Gkouvas claims that the interaction between interpretive canons and positive law is not in itself a distinct type of metaphysical relation but supervenes, nonetheless, on some metaphysically impactful properties of the related entities. In his conclusion, Gkouvas specifies this impact in mereological terms such that the modification of the legal effect of a legal provision by a canon amounts to a re-composition of the legal content of that provision through the incorporation of the legal content of the modifying canon into the legal content of the thereby modified provision.

Appeals to metaphysics have lately come to ascendancy in analytic legal philosophy. Over the last 20 years or so, a new discourse framework has emerged in analytic legal metaphysics that focusses on the explanatory question of how law is made. By any measure the most influential refinement of this question is to be found in Mark Greenberg's seminal 2004 article How Facts Make Law. This essay tries to exert some pressure on this familiar question by posing the categorial question of what type of entities different theories of law take up as ontologically basic for their inquiry. The essay singles out four exemplary avenues for answering the categorial question. Introducing a categorial instead of explanatory lens is an overdue step in the process of updating the metaphysical toolbox of contemporary analytic theories of law. The categorial question of what kind of entity law is ismeant to complement the explanatory question of how law is made in a way that makes disagreements about the metaphysical-explanatory demands of theories of law more tractable or amenable to principled adjudication.

Legality is a monograph scoring distinct contributions across the board of jurisprudential discourse. Among the most prominent arguments marshalled in this book is an impressively robust defence of reductionism about legal norms. The concept of a plan is invoked in the service of delivering a formidable task, that of disembarrassing the legal philosopher of the quest for what makes legal norms metaphysically distinct. The answer is simple, yet relies on an intricate chain of arguments: talk of legal norms is just a linguistic convention for referring to a metaphysically more versatile kind of object, namely, plans. This essay aims to record and evaluate the metaphysical implications of this reductionist turn. More precisely, it shall locate two defensible, yet sharply divergent, variants of plan positivism which Shapiro’s dense analysis appears to conflate at the expense of his theory’s explanatory ambitions. The concern this essay intends to raise regards an...

Even though the acknowledgment of the possibility of disagreement about the grounds of legal facts tends to acquire the shell of a mainstream view, the available regimentations of grounding disagreements in law limit their scope to two mutually exclusive jurisprudential variants. Ronald Dworkin’s original conception of theoretical disagreement as being about the responsibilities of government vis-à-vis its citizens is distinctly evaluative thereby excluding legal positivists from meaningful participation. An alternative descriptive variant has been recently defended by Scott Shapiro which replicates, nonetheless, the same exclusive function. The paper addresses this problem by locating its roots in the positivist elaboration of the idea that legal statements are inherently perspectival. After critically rejecting the perspectival model it proposes an alternative regimentation of legal statements as carrying metaphysical information about the constitution of legal content and explains how this non-perspectival model makes grounding disagreements in law maximally inclusive and meaningful.

El propósito de este trabajo es defender la opinión que Kant ha propuesto sobre la teoría internalista de la motivación moral. En particular, argumentaré que la adopción de Kant de internalismo se evidencia en su afirmación de que la relación de la razón pura de la voluntad se basa en una práctica una proposición sintética a priori. Lo que se pretende demostrar es que Kant trata la sinteticidad práctica como un concepto fundamental para su relato de lo que significa ser motivados por los principios de la razón pura. En mi conceptualización de la teoría motivacional de Kant, la relación entre las máximas universalizables y el interés moral de actuar sobre ellos es necesaria pero no tautológica, ya que violaciones de los derechos son lógicamente posibles a pesar de que tengamos una razón moral de actuar. Lo que impide que este último argumento colapse en una cuenta casi externalista de la motivación moral es que el impacto de motivación de las máximas como la ley, es en última instancia, la premisa de una concepción normativa de nosotros mismos como agentes libres.