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Full-Text Articles in Law
Contested Morality: Judge Posner On Infanticide, Slavery, Suttee, Female Genital Mutilation, And The Holocaust, Anthony D'Amato
Contested Morality: Judge Posner On Infanticide, Slavery, Suttee, Female Genital Mutilation, And The Holocaust, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
Judge Richard Posner locates his moral theory between moral absolutism and the "anything goes" kind of moral relativism. He analyzes whether five contested topics are subject to useful moral debate: infanticide, slavery, suttee, female genital mutilation, and the Holocaust. Each topic presents a different perspective on his own moral theory. But each one fails in a different way to place his own moral theory on a sound footing.
Law, Psychology & Morality, Kenworthey Bilz, Janice Nadler
Law, Psychology & Morality, Kenworthey Bilz, Janice Nadler
Faculty Working Papers
In a democratic society, law is an important means to express, manipulate, and enforce moral codes. Demonstrating empirically that law can achieve moral goals is difficult. Nevertheless, public interest groups spend considerable energy and resources to change the law with the goal of changing not only morally-laden behaviors, but also morally-laden cognitions and emotions. Additionally, even when there is little reason to believe that a change in law will lead to changes in behavior or attitudes, groups see the law as a form of moral capital that they wish to own, to make a statement about society. Examples include gay …