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...

Humility holds a modest but important place among the judicial virtues. But in spite of its growing popularity, it does not yet have a place on the ‘central judicial virtues’ lists. This paper provides an argument that judicial humility, especially institutional judicial humility, should be considered a necessary judicial virtue at least in common-law jurisdictions. This is because it is a necessary ingredient in precedent-based decisions that are fully justified from the point of view of the law and of political (...) morality. Further, while it is sufficient that individual judges make decisions that a humble judge would have made, the judicial community must in fact be humble in order to produce fully justified common-law decisions – humility is therefore necessary as a community-virtue. (shrink)

In contemporary society, as in classical Greece, we need citizens that deliberate well both for themselves and for society overall. Different competitors contend about the right principles in the theory of education. This paper holds that ‘character education’, descending from the ancient ethics of virtues, still represents the best option available for people who want to deliberate well for the common good. A special place in deliberation is taken by legal reasoning because the law is central in the distribution of (...) goods in our society. Rather than focusing only on rules and principles I follow the EV approach and focus on the qualities of the good decision-maker, the reasonable judge. The intellectual virtues of phronesis and techné combine those personal and professional qualities that we want at work in any judge. But it is the exercise of the civic art of rhetoric that expresses at best the public dimension of the reasonable judge. (shrink)

Ratio Juris, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 3-20, March 2022.

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.

Some authors have begun to appeal directly to studies of argumentation in their analyses of mathematical practice. These include researchers from an impressively diverse range of disciplines: not only philosophy of mathematics and argumentation theory, but also psychology, education, and computer science. This introduction provides some background to their work.

It has been a decade since the phrase virtue argumentation was introduced, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that it burst onto the scene, it would be just as much of an understatement to say that it has gone unnoticed. Trying to strike the virtuous mean between the extremes of hyperbole and litotes, then, we can fairly characterize it as a way of thinking about arguments and argumentation that has steadily attracted more and more attention from argumentation (...) theorists. We hope it is neither too late for an introduction to the field nor too soon for some retrospective assessment of where things stand. (shrink)

Según Manuel Atienza, la teoría de la argumentación jurídica se tiene que ocupar de responder tres preguntas: cómo analizar una argumentación, cómo evaluarla y cómo argumentar. Esta concepción de la teoría de la argumentación jurídica es, sin embargo, demasiado restrictiva. Además de proporcionar una respuesta adecuada a estas preguntas, una teoría de la argumentación jurídica debe ocuparse también de la cuestión de qué virtudes debe tener un juez para hacer buenas argumentaciones. La teoría de la argumentación jurídica está, por ello, (...) íntimamente vinculada con una teoría de la ética judicial. According to Manuel Atienza, a theory of legal reasoning should give an answer to the following three questions: how to analyze an argumentation, how to evaluate it, and how to argue. This conception of the theory of legal reasoning is, however, too restrictive. in addition to providing a sound answer to these questions, a theory of legal reasoning should also give us an answer to the question of which judicial virtues are necessary to make good arguments. A theory of legal reasoning is thus intimately linked to a theory of judicial ethics. (shrink)

In the Statesman, Plato seems to be advocating that in the absence of a true king who will rule independently of laws, the next best thing as far as just rule is concerned is to ad here rigidly to existing laws, whatever they are. The rule of the true king is given as an example of virtuous rule in the sense that virtue politics or jurisprudence holds that laws cannot always deal justly with particular cases. But Plato’s view of what (...) we must do when there are no true kings forthcoming seems to preclude a virtue theoretical understanding of politics and laws. In this paper I will investigate the view that the image of the true king, who relies on written laws for convenience only, provides a model for a more realistic appeal to virtue in jurisprudence, that is, a respect of laws that is compatible with equity, in the sense understood by Aristotle.Čini se da Platon u Državniku zagovara shvaćanje prema kojemu u odsutnosti istinskog kralja koji će vladati neovisno o zakonima druga najbolja stvar, što se tiče pravedne vladavine, jest strogo pridržavanje postojećih zakona, što god oni bili. Uloga istinskog kralja navodi se kao primjer vrle vladavine u tom smislu što politika ili jurisprudencija koje se zasnivaju na vrlini drže da zakoni ne mogu uvijek pravedno izlaziti na kraj s pojedinačnim slučajevima. No čini se da Platonovo shvaćanje toga što moramo činiti kada ne postoje istinski kraljevi sprječava razumijevanje politike i zakonâ koje se zasniva na teoriji vrline. U ovom članku ispitujem shvaćanje prema kojemu slika istinskog kralja, koji se na pisane zakone oslanja samo iz praktičnih razloga, pruža model za realističnije pozivanje na vrlinu u jurisprudenciji, to jest poštivanje zakonâ koje je spojivo s nepristranošću u onom smislu u kojem to razumije Aristotel. (shrink)