In 2007, the Ethics and Governance Council of the UK Biobank commissioned a Report on ‘Concepts of Public Good and Pubic Interest in Access Policies’. This study considered the Biobank’s role as a ‘public good’ in respect to supporting and promoting health throughout society. However, the conditions under which access by third parties to UK Biobank are justified in the public interest have not been well considered. In this article, I propose to analyse the conditions that should allow such access. (...) My argument develops UK Biobank’s function as a ‘public good’ and in terms of its responsibilities as a public health institution; both to protect the rights of the participants and in having a role in reinforcing public goals. Although these two tasks may conflict, it is possible that resolute opposition to some third-party access demands—if properly justified in terms of a public interest—will be damaging to, rather than protective of, participants’ rights. To illustrate my argument, I consider the appropriate response to an extraordinary public emergency , such as a serious criminal investigation or disaster response, in terms of an ethical access policy. (shrink)

Anglo-American authors have paid little attention to a subtle distinction that has important jurisprudential implications. It is the distinction between sources of law and the legal norms which can be derived from sources by means of interpretation. The distinction might also be rendered as a threefold one, separating sources of law from legal norms and both of these from that which mediates their relation, namely, methods of legal interpretation. This paper intends to state the “source-norm” distinction clearly and to give (...) examples of jurisprudential insights that are missed, and mistakes that may be made if the distinction is not given its due. (shrink)

Some libertarians tend to advocate the wide availability of cognition-enhancing drugs beyond their current prescription-only status. They suggest that certain kinds of drugs can be a component of a prudential conception of the ‘good life’—they enhance our opportunities and preferences; and therefore, if a person freely chooses to use them, then there is no justification for the kind of prejudicial, authoritative restrictions that are currently deployed in public policy. In particular, this libertarian idea signifies that if enhancements are a prudential (...) ‘good’ for the user, then this can also be construed as a moral good for all rational agents. If this argument is successful, there can be no substantial distinction between the categorical benefits of enhancement, and what is labeled as an enhancement technology. In this paper, I argue that the exclusivity of egotistical choice, and an uncritical deployment of enhancement as a prudential good, underplays the role of a social and political community when creating a procedurally just and effective public policy. Principally, the argument is devoid of any ethical system to permit the external—and therefore public–appreciation of the social context of moral decisions. In effect, libertarian arguments of this sort must disregard any ideas of public ethics, because the liberty to use whatever means available to gain a socio-economic advantage actually extinguishes any professed legitimation strategy. Escaping the procedural aspects of public policy, which are considered integral to authoritative coherence, results in the erosion of any moral obligations. Thus, in a libertarian society, disenfranchised individuals—such as those harmed through addiction—are the unlucky or superfluous product of a liberal and ‘progressive’ society. (shrink)

I am grateful to Feeney and colleagues for their thoughtful engagement with, and application of, the normative analysis I developed concerning gene patents in Farrelly (2016). Their exploration of...

This paper deals with the question of how norms are to be conceived of in order to understand their role as guidelines for human action within various normative orders, particularly in the context of law on the one hand and conventional morality on the other. After some brief remarks on the history of the term “norm,” the author outlines the most significant general features of actually existing social norms, including legal and conventional norms, from which he arrives at two basic (...) requirements on an appropriate conception of such norms: the actuality and the normativity requirements. On this basis, he enters into a critical discussion of Kelsen's highly influential view of norms, arguing that this view is doomed to failure. In the last part of the paper, the author scrutinizes the more promising “practice theory of norms” by H.L.A. Hart, which, in his view, also suffers from some shortcomings, but may be modified in a way that leads to a conception of social norms providing us with a plausible explication of their actual existence and their normative force. (shrink)

Two claims lay the foundation for Beyleveld and Brownsword’s legal theory. The first says that immoral laws cannot be law, the second that rights to freedom and welfare can be proven to be logically necessary given merely the phenomenon of agency. The author argues that both claims are too strong. The first is an overidealization of law, which fails to do justice to its double nature as a real as well as an ideal phenomenon. The second must fail, for a (...) moral “ought” cannot be deduced from a merely instrumental “ought.”. (shrink)

In this paper, I make an attempt to look for a thin and general concept of law that, as far as possible, should be neutral to the more substantial views of legal moralism and legal positivism, so that it is acceptable from both points of view. With this aim in view, I shall begin with a few remarks on concept formation and name a list of necessary requirements on an appropriate concept of law. On this basis, I intend to discuss (...) a number of contemporary legal theories in view to their respective interpretations of the concept of law. Finally, I want to propose a definition of law that not only satisfies the requirements of the concept of law, but is also general enough to be compatible with both camps of legal thinking. (shrink)

It is argued that accepting that there are human rights, or that there are categorically binding requirements of any kind on action, logically requires accepting the PGC (Principle of Generic Consistency) as the supreme criterion of practical reasonableness.Consequently, all legal systems that recognise human rights (hence, the English legal system), all who view law as a matter of obligation, and all who consider that there are categorically binding requirements on action, must take the PGC to be a necessary criterion of (...) legal validity. Conventions on human rights must, as conventions on human rights, be interpreted to conform with the PGC. (shrink)

The question of the moral status of AI and the extent to which that status ought to be recognised by societal institutions is one that has not yet received a satisfactory answer from lawyers. This paper seeks to provide a solution to the problem by defending a moral foundation for the recognition of legal personhood for AI, requiring the status to be granted should a threshold criterion be reached. The threshold proposed will be bare, noumenal agency in the Kantian sense. (...) Agency has been identified by Alan Gewirth as the source of the rights claims of our own species and, at risk of contradiction, is a foundation that must be expanded to all agents or else we contradict the foundation of our own rights. This is something that ought to be recognised through the granting of legal personhood to all noumenal agents by any system that requires such personhood for the enforcement of rights, or else the rule restricting legal personhood cannot be seen as a valid legal norm. Having laid out the case, the paper will move on to defend this natural law conception against the narrower definition of legal personhood proposed by Bryson et al. with regards to AI. It will argue that bare agency is a sufficient, though not necessary, criterion for the ascription of legal personhood in any system that sees the status as necessary for the ascription of legal rights. The paper will conclude by analysing the proposals currently making their way through the legislatures of the UK and European Union. They will be assessed for their compatibility with the claim that a functioning legal system necessarily must recognise the legal personhood of all noumenal agents regardless of their origins, and whether they are future-proofed for the possibility that AI may meet this threshold. (shrink)

This paper presents a sketch of the way in which an ideal-typical community of rights, Gewirthia, responds to the so-called “internal problem of authority.” Notwithstanding the deep moral consensus in Gewirthia, where citizens are fully committed to the Principle of Generic Consistency (requiring that agents respect one another’s freedom and basic well-being), Gewirthians make no claim to “know all the answers.” In consequence, public governance in Gewirthia needs a strategy for dealing with the many kinds of disputes—disputes that relate to (...) matters of both principle and practice—that require authoritative settlement. In this context, having outlined the nature of (and justification for) the procedural strategy that Gewirthia adopts in order to resolve such disputes, we discuss the range of regulatory questions that are potentially moot in Gewirthia, and focus on three hard cases in which the State might argue for a precautionary licence—namely, where there is a dispute about indirect and speculative harm to rights-holders, about harm to arguable rights-holders, and about the possible corrosion of the conditions that are essential for the sustainability of a moral community. (shrink)

The dispute between Legal Positivists (eg, Hart) and Natural Lawyers (e.g., Finnis) concerns the existence or otherwise of a necessary (conceptual) connection between law and morality. Legal Positivists such as Hart deny this connection and assert the merely contingent relationship of law and morals. However, it can be demonstrated that implicit in the valid sociological method of concept formation of post‐Austinian Positivists are interpretative or ideal‐typical models of the practical rationality of the legal enterprise which are not, and cannot possibly (...) be, value‐neutral. With particular attention to the work of John Finnis and his incorporation of Weberian and Aristotelian methodological principles, this paper exposes, if not the truth of Natural Law Theory, the impossibility of Legal Positivism. (shrink)

The separability thesis claims that the concept of law can be explicated independently of morality, the normativity thesis, that it can be explicated independently of fact. Continental normativism, prominent above all in the work of Hans Kelsen, may be characterized in terms of the coupling of these theses. Like Kelsen, H. L. A. Hart is a proponent of the separability thesis. And–a leitmotiv–both theorists reject reductive legal positivism. They do not, however, reject it for the same reasons. Kelsen's reason, in (...) a word, is the normativity thesis. Hart, however, grounds his theory in social fact. In place of the reductive thesis of the legal positivist tradition, and in sharp contrast to Kelsen's normativity thesis, Hart defends a non‐reductive version of what the author terms the facticity thesis. (shrink)

The law of England and Wales provides that an adult with capacity has the right to refuse medical treatment both contemporaneously and in an advance refusal. Legislation separates general advance refusals of treatment from advance refusals of life-sustaining treatment. The law, outlined in ss.24 to 26 of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, is stricter for creation of the latter. These sections brought with them a new age of interests by purporting to elevate individual autonomy as the primary concern. Beginning with (...) the classical tale of Odysseus and a general discussion of the value to be found in a law seeking to preserve individual autonomy, this thesis seeks to act as a critique of the current enactment in practice. The provisions are already under-used and under-applied; without change, they may never reach the stage where they are ethically and practically viable. It is argued that the advance refusals provisions are not taking full effect due to a combination of lacking moral grounding and general dismissal of key ethical dilemmas at the forefront of application. Building on this, the moral basis for this thesis is found in Alan Gewirth’s Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC) which links directly with the general application of human rights. The PGC becomes a compass for determining how best to treat persons when addressing the three most prominent challenges faced by the 2005 Act which are: the debate between the conferred right of autonomy versus the right to life; the issue of personhood; and, the personal identity problem. Ultimately, unless framework provisions are strengthened, and the Mental Capacity Act 2005 is rethought in light of prominent ethical, legal and social considerations, the constraints of the Act on paper will continue to suppress the important underlying values promulgating individual autonomy. (shrink)

In this late modern era within which the basic values of life have been reordered (driven by globalisation, the corporate agenda and mass communication technologies), the individual has effectively been reduced to a mere abstraction. It might be argued that the rational, moral and humanistic concept of freedom has, to a great extent, been compromised by a consequent crisis within the intelligentsia. These groups, in particular the gatekeepers of a classical liberal approach to legal scholarship, are caught between the twin (...) evils of increased unreflective populism and pragmatism evident within many law schools and modern legal institutions. Although a contested term, defenders of the ‘socio-legal’ tradition, who place the humanities at the heart of legal research and education, are obliged to restate with increased determination the utility of the liberal arts and literature to the law profession and wider legal community. In a normative environment, law and narrative are inextricably linked and narrative poetry is not only invaluable to explaining the origins and location of the legal tradition, but also elicits a mode of understanding which transcends the boundaries of narrowlydefined legal hermeneutics—which often only addresses issues of an operational nature. French novelist Flaubert claimed “chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d’un poète” (Flaubert in Madame bovary (trans: Wall, G.), Penguin Classics, London, 1960: 269), paraphrased by American civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, as “inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet” (Lukas in Big trouble: a murder in a small western town sets off a struggle for the soul of America, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997: 323). In an age of disenchantment, this paper explores the poetic form as an important medium within which to understand the nature and function of law in a society of differentiated individuals. (shrink)

This paper introduces questions about the nature of law. It briefly identifies why modern biotechnology poses interesting issues for regulation. Thereafter it considers two questions—the legitimacy of law, and the relationship between law and morality. It concludes by considering issues of participation and of appealing to the public interest.

This article provides a critical introduction to an issue fo Ratio Juris concerend with two contrasting schools of legal idealism: the so-called Sheffield School (Beyleveld, Brownsword and colleagues) and the “discourse ethics” school of Habermas and Alexy. The article focusses on four issues: (1) whether a "claim to correctness" is a necessary feature of law, (2) the connection between correctness and validity, (3) Alexy's argument for a "qualifying connection" between law and morality, and its counterpart in the Sheffield School's approach, (...) and (4) Alexy's case for the "Radbruch formula": that "extreme injustice is not law”. While rejecting both versions of the case for legal idealism, I argue that both schools offer vaulable, and broadly similar, insights into what makes a legal system morally legitimate. (shrink)

Ethical and legal discourse pertaining to the ability to consent to treatment and research in England operates within a dualist framework of “competence” and “capacity”. This is confusing, as while there exists in England two possible senses of legal capacity – “first person” legal capacity and “delegable” legal capacity, currently neither is formulated to bear a necessary relationship with decision-making competence. Notwithstanding this, judges and academic commentators frequently invoke competence to consent in discussions involving the validity of offering or withholding (...) consent as a synonym for legal capacity to consent. I argue that this gives rise to a conflation, jeopardising clarity and consistency in law. This is somewhat less problematic in instances of “first-person” legal capacity that are heavily informed by criteria for decision-making competence than in the second sense of legal capacity, which is qualitatively different from decision-making competence, or with first-person legal capacity when defined in different terms from competence. The paper concludes by proposing that the soundest resolution to this problem is by making decision-making competence a necessary and sufficient condition of first-person legal capacity, affording a more scrupulous distinction between the two different forms of legal capacity that exist. (shrink)