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Full-Text Articles in Law

Legal Positivism As An Idea About Morality, Martin J. Stone Apr 2011

Legal Positivism As An Idea About Morality, Martin J. Stone

Articles

I ask what a proper critical target for 'legal positivism' might be. I argue that utilitarian moral theory, and more generally fully directive moral theories, are unacknowledged motivations for legal positivism. Contemporary debate about 'the nature of law' is, historically speaking, much more of a footnote to utilitarianism than has been recognized.


Emotion, Neuroscience, And Law: A Comment On Darwin And Greene, John Mikhail Jan 2011

Emotion, Neuroscience, And Law: A Comment On Darwin And Greene, John Mikhail

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Darwin’s (1871) observation that evolution has produced in us certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct that lack any obvious basis in individual utility is a useful springboard from which to clarify the role of emotion in moral judgment. The problem is whether a certain class of moral judgments is “constituted” or “driven by” emotion (Greene 2008, p. 108) or merely correlated with emotion while being generated by unconscious computations (e.g., Huebner et al. 2008). With one exception, all of the “personal” vignettes devised by Greene and colleagues (2001, 2004) and subsequently used by other researchers (e.g., Koenigs et …