Law, Virtue and Justice
Edited by Amalia Amaya and Ho Hock Lai
This book explores the relevance of virtue theory to law from a variety of perspectives. The concept of virtue is central in both contemporary ethics and epistemology. In contrast, in law, there has not been a comparable trend toward explaining normativity on the model of virtue theory. In the last few years, however, there has been an increasing interest in virtue theory among legal scholars. 'Virtue jurisprudence' has emerged as a serious candidate for a theory of law and adjudication. Advocates of virtue jurisprudence put primary emphasis on aretaic concepts rather than on duties or consequences. Aretaic concepts are, on this view, crucial for explaining law and adjudication. This book is a collection of essays examining the role of virtue in general jurisprudence as well as in specific areas of the law. Part I puts together a number of papers discussing various philosophical aspects of an approach to law and adjudication based on the virtues. Part II discusses the relationship between law, virtue and character development, with some of the essays selected analysing this relationship by combining both eastern perspectives on virtue and character with western approaches. Parts III and IV examine problems of substantive areas of law, more specifically, criminal law and evidence law, from within a virtue-based framework. Last, Part V discusses the relevance of empathy to our understanding of justice and legal morality.
Amalia Amaya is a Researcher in the Institute of Philosophical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Ho Hock Lai is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the National University of Singapore.
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3 comments:
I appealed to the classical Greek notion of "arete" (or "virtue" or "natural excellence" or something of the sort) in my very first published paper, "Mapping Inferential Domains," (1986) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1134952
In 2008 I returned explicitly to a neo-Aristotelian view of human reason in P. Tillers, "Are There Universal Principles or Forms of Evidential Inference? Of Inference Networks and Onto-Epistemology," in William Twining, Philip Dawid & Dimitra Vasilaki, eds., Evidence, Inference and Enquiry (Oxford University Press & British Academy, 2011) (modified version of essay published in Crime, Procedure, and Evidence in a Comparative and International Context (Jackson, Langer & Tillers, eds., Hart Publishing, 2008), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1079235
I arrived at my neo-Aristotelian view of things inductively: I could not explain (to myself) the interaction of so-called descriptive and prescriptive accounts of factual inference without a notion such as "natural excellence." I hope to elaborate on this general point soon - perhaps this spring - in a paper that has been lurking in my mind for several years. (I have uttered some fragments of my views about "reason" in public -- e.g., in blogs, at a conference or two, etc.)
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