ABSTRACTThis article puts judicial perception at the centre of adjudication and of what makes a judge a good judge. It offers a philosophical and empiricist account of judicial perception. Judicial perception is presented as a special ethical, character-dependent skill that a judge needs in order to adequately attend and respond to the cases he is confronted with. In this account ‘thick concepts’ play a vital role. Throughout the text Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act is used as an illustrative source.

This paper examines the concept of coherence and its role in legal reasoning. First, it identifies some problem areas confronting coherence theories of legal reasoning about both disputed questions of fact and disputed questions of law. Second, with a view to solving these problems, it proposes a coherence model of legal reasoning. The main tenet of this coherence model is that a belief about the law and the facts under dispute is justified if it is “optimally coherent,” that is, if (...) it is such that an epistemically responsible legal decision-maker would have accepted it as justified by virtue of its coherence in like circumstances. Last, looking beyond the coherence theory, the paper explores the implications of the version of legal coherentism proposed for a general theory of legal reasoning and rationality. (shrink)

Virtue theories have become influential in ethics and epistemology. This paper argues for a similar approach to argumentation. Several potential obstacles to virtue theories in general, and to this new application in particular, are considered and rejected. A first attempt is made at a survey of argumentational virtues, and finally it is argued that the dialectical nature of argumentation makes it particularly suited for virtue theoretic analysis.

In his essay ‘Ethical Consistency’, Bernard Williams famously introduced the concept of a moral remainder, which points to the phenomenon of an in itself defensible decision that may nonetheless re...

BackgroundMedical ethics has recently seen a drive away from multiple prescriptive approaches, where physicians are inundated with guidelines and principles, towards alternative, less deontological perspectives. This represents a clear call for theory building that does not produce more guidelines. Phronesis (practical wisdom) offers an alternative approach for ethical decision-making based on an application of accumulated wisdom gained through previous practice dilemmas and decisions experienced by practitioners. Phronesis, as an ‘executive virtue’, offers a way to navigate the practice virtues for any (...) given case to reach a final decision on the way forward. However, very limited empirical data exist to support the theory of phronesis-based medical decision-making, and what does exist tends to focus on individual practitioners rather than practice-based communities of physicians.MethodsThe primary research question was: What does it mean to medical practitioners to make ethically wise decisions for patients and their communities? A three-year ethnographic study explored the practical wisdom of doctors (n = 131) and used their narratives to develop theoretical understanding of the concepts of ethical decision-making. Data collection included narrative interviews and observations with hospital doctors and General Practitioners at all stages in career progression. The analysis draws on neo-Aristotelian, MacIntyrean concepts of practice- based virtue ethics and was supported by an arts-based film production process.ResultsWe found that individually doctors conveyed many different practice virtues and those were consolidated into fifteen virtue continua that convey the participants’ ‘collective practical wisdom’, including the phronesis virtue. This study advances the existing theory and practice on phronesis as a decision-making approach due to the availability of these continua.ConclusionGiven the arguments that doctors feel professionally and personally vulnerable in the context of ethical decision-making, the continua in the form of a video series and app based moral debating resource can support before, during and after decision-making reflection. The potential implications are that these theoretical findings can be used by educators and practitioners as a non-prescriptive alternative to improve ethical decision-making, thereby addressing the call in the literature, and benefit patients and their communities, as well. (shrink)

The Jubilee Centre’s new report, Virtuous Character for the Practice of Law, sets about trying to examine the place of character and values in the legal profession in Britain. The report draws its findings from a UK focused survey of 966 lawyers and aspiring lawyers at varying stages of their careers. It is one of the largest pieces of research carried out in Britain focusing on issues of character and virtue within a specific industry sector.

Law contains many dualities, though most, if not all, of these dualities resolve into one complex puzzle: To what extent is law a matter of pure social facts, or moral value untethered to social facts? I argue that each concept of law reconciles this duality in a different way on the basis of certain beneficial consequences that might result. Instead of pitting concepts against one another universally, we should accept that the balance between law's social fact and moral value dimensions (...) is context-specific in relation to particular legal puzzles. This balance can be achieved only by considering both political theory and empirical data. (shrink)