Law Commons^™

Intention And Motivation, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

What is the role of intentions in the actions intended? What do they contribute, and how do they contribute to the occurrence of the intended actions?

The paper will offer an account of acting with an intention and of having an intention to act. It will not offer an account of intentional action, merely suggesting that when intentional actions are not actions done with an intention, their explanation as intentional relates to that of actions with intentions, showing how like them and unlike them they are. Motivation will be discussed mainly to distinguish its role in leading to action from …

Can Moral Principles Change?, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The paper considers the main arguments against the possibility that basic normative principles can change, and finds them wanting. The principal argument discussed derives from the claim that normative considerations are intelligible, and therefore that they can be explained, and their explanations presuppose the prior existence of basic normative principles. The intelligibility thesis is affirmed but the implication that basic change is impossible is denied. Subsumptive explanations are contrasted with explanations by analogy. Later in the paper, other objections are considered more briefly: that normative properties are queer, that they are unconnected to the rest of reality, and therefore cannot …

Why The State?, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

I offer two questions for the price of one: Why do so many jurisprudential theories focus on the state? And what is it about the State that gives it a special place in our social arrangements? I do not mean these to address all aspects of states. They are questions about the law or legal systems of states.

We have to be open to a negative answer to the second question, thus being critical of jurisprudential theories that focus more or less exclusively on the state. That need not deny that states have their own legal systems. It could merely …

On The Moral Significance Of Sacrifice, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The paper offers a few reflections on moral implications of making sacrifices and of possible duties to make sacrifices. It does not provide an exhaustive or a systematic account of the subject. There are too many disparate questions, and too many distant perspectives from which to examine them to allow for a systematic let alone an exhaustive account, and too many factual issues that I am not aware of. Needless to say, the observations that follow are in part stimulated by the popularity of some views that are mistaken. I will not however examine any specific view or account of …