Abstract
In this chapter I should like to discuss some assumptions and to establish some theses which seem to me to characterise a specific conception of justice. I call this conception the ‘analytico-dialectical theory of justice’ or ‘dialectical theory of justice’ for short. The term ‘dialectical’ is here to be understood in a non-Hegelian sense, which will in due course be explained. The discussion is divided into the following ten sections:
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Section 1
Theories of justice are concerned to provide objective criteria as to what is just (and thus as to how the concept of justice should be defined). They present these principles of justice either as formal criteria or as substantive criteria which are intuitively evident and a priori or as anthropological facts or as articles of religious faith. Utilitarian theories and Rawlsian contract theory also offer objective determinants of what is just and what is unjust. By contrast, legal positivism in its strong version says that it is only relative to some given system of positive norms that questions of justice can arise at all.
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Section 2
Precepts of justice must be understood as justifying grounds of decision and action, that is, as elements of practical reasoning.
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Section 3
My starting point is a non-cognitivist conception of practical reasoning. There is such a thing as practical thought and practical argumentation, but no such thing as practical cognition.
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Notes to Chapter VII
What is intended here is, of course, the first formulation of the categorical imperative (“Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law”, I. Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics, trans. by T. K. Abbot, 10th ed., London, 1962, p. 46), not the by no means equivalent second formulation (“So act as to treat humanity whether in thirie own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only” (ibid., p. 56)). The second formulation is a substantive rule which postulates a teleological commitment of a kind which can only be valid given some prior moral commitment.
Ch. Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument (trans. by J. Petrie, London, 1963), p. 29 : “Formal justice has been defined as the principle of action according to which the persons who belong to one and the same essential category ought to be treated in the same way”.
Cf. R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963).
R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford, 1952), pp. 191ff;
R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason, p. 90 et passim; Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford, 1981).
Cf. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971); on the problem of this sort of fictitious consensus, see O. Weinberger, Die Rolle des Konsensus in der Wissenschaft’, Rechtstheorie (1981), Beiheft 2, pp. 147–165.
I have elsewhere rejected as illusory the purported justification of principles of justice through the ‘original position’ and the ‘hypothetical contract’. See O. Weinberger, ‘Begründung oder Illusion. Erkenntniskritische Gedanken zu John Rawls’ Theorie der Gerechtigkeit’, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung (1977), Bd. 31, Heft 2, pp. 195–216, republished in my Logische Analysen in der Jurisprudenz (Berlin, 1979), pp. 195–216.
Notwithstanding my critical attitude towards Rawls, I by no means undervalue the importance of his work, in particular his idea about the ‘veil of ignorance’, his reflections on ‘reflective equilibrium’ and his allusions to the importance of procedural justice.
Cf. O. Weinbeger, ‘Rationales und irrationales Handeln’, in Recht und Gesellschaft: Festschrift für Helmut Schelsky zum 65. Geburtstag (ed. by F. Kaulbach and W. Krawietz, Berlin, 1978), pp. 721–44;
Cf. O. Weinbeger, ‘Handeln und Schließen. Überlegung zum Begriff der Praktischen Inferenz’, in F. van Dun (ed), The Law between Morality and Politics, Philosophica 23 (1979), pp. 5–36;
Ch. Weinberger and O. Weinberger, Logik, Semantik, Hermeneutik (Munich, 1979), Chapter 8;
O. Weinberger, ‘Studien zur formalfinalistischen Handlungstheorie’, Beiträge zur Allgemeinen Rechts- und Staatslehre 5 (Berne and Frankfurt/Main, 1983).
The restriction of the principle of non-derivability to informative conclusions seems necessary for the following reason: analytically valid declarative propositions can be derived as conclusions from premises of either type. The same holds good for normative sentences which are devoid of information, such as, for example, an oughtsentence with the structure ‘If p ⋀p, then q ought to be’. For more details of my view on norm-logical inferences, see Ch. Weinberger and O. Weinberger, Logik, Semantik, Hermeneutik (Munich, 1979).
J. Jørgensen, ‘Imperatives and Logic’, Erkenntnis 7 (1937–38), 288–96;
K., Engliš Die Lehre von der Denkordnung (Vienna, 1961) and Die Norm ist kein Urteil’, ARSP 50 (1964), 305–16;
H. Kelsen, Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (ed. by K. Ringhofer and R. Walter, Vienna, 1979).
Cf. also O. Weinberger, Normentheorie als Grundlage der Jurisprudenz und Ethik. Eine Auseinandensetzung mit Hans Kelsens Theorie der Normen (Berlin, 1981); ‘Kelsens These von der Unanwendbarkeit logischer Regeln auf Normen’ [‘Kelsen’s Thesis as to the Nonderivability of Logical Rules from Norms’], in Die Reine Rechtslehre in wissenschaftlicher Diskussion (Vienna, 1982), pp. 108–21.
Cf. on this and the next following point, Weinberger, ‘Rationales und irrationeles Handeln’.
Cf. Ch. Weinberger and O. Weinberger ‘Teleonomie und formal Teleologie’, in Logik, Ethik und Sprache, Festschrift für Rudolf Freundlich (Vienna, 1981), pp. 108–21.
How exactly this is to be accomplished I cannot say.
Cf. Rawls, Theory of Justice, pp. 38f, 68ff.
Cf. O. Weinberger Wahrheit, Recht und Moral. Eine Analyse auf kommunikationstheoretischer Grundlage’, Rechtstheorie 1 (1970), 129–46.
Common goals are, for example, pursued by spouses in the rearing of their children or in safeguarding the economic basis of their household. Complementary goals are, for example, pursued by teacher and pupil or by opponents in a game. When people in their several roles are in competition with each other, the goals they pursue are often mutually opposed; yet for all that, both parties can aspire to playing their own role. Consider for instance the relationship between seller and buyer: with respect to the price, they have mutually opposed goals, yet they have each a similar interest in the trading relationship.
Cf. on this point Kant’s idea of the highest good. For Kant, the interconnection of morality and happiness is an article of faith and of hope. To me, it seems more reasonable to champion an analogous postulate concerning just conduct, and to propose it as a goal for a just organisation of society. It is to be wished that just and moral conduct should at least have a certain probability of being more conducive to a prosperous way of life than evil-doing.
Cf. O. Weinberger, Dialektik und philosophische Analyse’, in Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (ed. by E. Topitsch assisted by P. Payer, 10th edition, Cologne and Berlin, 1980), pp. 278–309.
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Weinberger, O. (1986). The Analytico-Dialectical Theory of Justice: A Sketch of an Action-Theoretical and Non-Cognitivist Theory of Justice. In: An Institutional Theory of Law. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7727-4_8
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