Rawls says that public reason is the reason of the citizens of a democratic state and takes the Supreme Court in the USA as the exemplar of public reason. It differs from non public reason, which is used e.g., in universities and academic institutions. Rawls contrasts with Kant, which opposes the public reason of the scholar—or the philosopher—, who speaks before the world, to the private reason of state or church officials. The later, once they accept an authority, cannot think (...) by themselves (selbst denken). A closer examination shows that Rawls is not so far from Kant as it seems, because he takes the constitutional judges not as they are, but as they should be. However Rawls still apparently refuses Kant’s unity of reason. Further investigation of the relations between ethical reason, democratic reason and legal reason is needed. Democratic reason is tantamount both to public reason and to legal reason in a modern constitutional state. It is a requirement of ethics but still not identical with ethical reason, since it is possible to accept democratic reason and to argue against it from an ethical point of view. There is just one good way of reasoning, in spite of the constraints that the sources of law and the rules of procedure impose on legal reasoning, compared with ethics. Such constraints are based on the democratic principle, which is again based on ethical reason, which at last both grounds and limits the constraints that law imposes on reason. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza los intentos llevados a cabo por Jeremy Bentham y John Stuart Mill para hacer converger algunos de los principales modelos de fundamentación moral: las éticas de la felicidad, como la aristotélica, o la propia ética utilitarista, las éticas del deber de raíz kantiana y las éticas de los derechos.Si conseguimos “reducir”, en primer lugar, las éticas de los derechos al modelo de la ética del deber, podremos simplificar mucho la cuestión y limitarnos a contrastar este último modelo (...) con las éticas de la felicidad, que a su vez deberían converger en la propia ética de la utilidad. No obstante, y aun reconociendo su gran interés, una convergencia completa entre modelos alternativos se revela como imposible. A pesar de los esfuerzos, sobre todo de John Stuart Mill, no es posible una unificación completa de los planteamientos utilitaristas con los de Aristóteles y Kant. La continuación de la empresa utilitarista de lucha por la unificación teórica en el ámbito del problema de la fundamentación moral encuentra un buen ejemplo actual en la obra de Esperanza Guisán. (shrink)

Does Duncan Kennedy successfully cannibalize jurisprudence? He attempts to do it by demonstrating the inexistence of rightness in legal argumentation. If there is no right legal argument, then there is no right answer in adjudication, adjudication is not a rational enterprise and legal doctrine cannot be said to be a science. It can be shown that skepticism is self-defeating. Duncan Kennedy can avoid self defeat only because he actually believes in a lot of legal arguments. His thesis that judges decide (...) questions of policy without any methodology that distinguishes them from legislators does not hold. Judicial reasoning is subject to constraints that do not affect legislators. It must be based on the sources of law and is limited by rules of procedure. Even when the judges have ‘interstitial’ legislative powers they are, unlike the legislator, bound to fit the system and their decisions are considered in procedure from the perspective of the right answer doctrine. The only work that can convincingly refute the skeptic argument against legal science is the reconstruction of jurisprudence as a scientific enterprise. Such work is beyond the scope of any single paper. The article aims to give some inspirations for such a task. (shrink)