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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Natural Law - A Libertarian View, Anthony D'Amato
Natural Law - A Libertarian View, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
What follows from the following two propositions? Legal positivism views law as a command writ large. The commander is the person or group with the most power. Answer: this pernicious mind-set is responsible for our abandonment of personal liberty. For there can be no limit to the imagination and will power of the commander. The plenary jurisdiction of the commander paves the way for Big Government to move in and regulate every aspect of our lives and our privacy. The world wasn't always like this. Prior to the servility that positivism has induced, there was a now-forgotten secular natural law …
Moral Spillovers: The Effect Of Moral Violations On Deviant Behavior, Elizabeth Mullen, Janice Nadler
Moral Spillovers: The Effect Of Moral Violations On Deviant Behavior, Elizabeth Mullen, Janice Nadler
Faculty Working Papers
Two experiments investigated whether outcomes that violate people's moral standards increase their deviant behavior (the moral spillover effect). In Study 1, participants read about a legal trial in which the outcome supported, opposed or was unrelated to their moral convictions. Relative to when outcomes supported moral convictions, when outcomes opposed moral convictions people judged the outcome to be less fair, were more angry, were less willing to accept the outcome, and were more likely to take a borrowed pen. In Study 2, participants who recalled another person's moral violation were more likely to cheat on an experimental task relative to …
The Moral Dilemma Of Positivism, Anthony D'Amato
The Moral Dilemma Of Positivism, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
I think there has been an advance in positivist thinking, and that advance consists of the recognition by MacCormick, a positivist, that positivism needs to be justified morally (and not just as an apparent scientific and objective fact about legal systems). But the justification that is required cannot consist in labelling "sovereignty of conscience" as a moral principle, nor in compounding the confusion by claiming that positivism minimally and hence necessarily promotes sovereignty of conscience. We need, from the positivists, a more logical and coherent argument than that. Until one comes along, I continue to believe that positivists inherently have …