Description
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Legal Norms and Normativity: An Essay in Genealogy by Sylvie Delacroix
This book offers a genealogical explanation of laws normativity. The term genealogical conveys a commitment to a non-metaphysical type of enquiry. While it explains how law as a normative phenomenon comes about it does not seek to ground laws normativity in anything but the context of social interaction giving rise to it. Legal normativity is brought about on a daily basis. Whether in revolutionary circumstances or in the quotidian need for judges lawmakers or citizens to balance laws demands with those of morality or prudence our ability to bind ourselves through law ultimately depends on our capacity to articulate a better way of living together and to commit ourselves to it. These efforts of assessment and articulation depend in turn on our conception of normative agency. Assert the need to trace the truth of ethical judgments to some independent moral facts conditioning their objectivity and you will get a different understanding of what it is we are doing when we dispute laws authority in the name of moral values.Tracing the truth of moral judgements back to our own social practices not only affects the nature of disagreement; it also dramatically increases our responsibility when as lawmakers judges or citizens we take the law into our own hands and confront it with our moral expectations.show more