Resisting Perspectivalism about Law: The Scope of Jurisprudential Disagreement

Jurisprudence 8 (2):205-229 (2017)
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Abstract

Even though the acknowledgment of the possibility of disagreement about the grounds of legal facts tends to acquire the shell of a mainstream view, the available regimentations of grounding disagreements in law limit their scope to two mutually exclusive jurisprudential variants. Ronald Dworkin’s original conception of theoretical disagreement as being about the responsibilities of government vis-à-vis its citizens is distinctly evaluative thereby excluding legal positivists from meaningful participation. An alternative descriptive variant has been recently defended by Scott Shapiro which replicates, nonetheless, the same exclusive function. The paper addresses this problem by locating its roots in the positivist elaboration of the idea that legal statements are inherently perspectival. After critically rejecting the perspectival model it proposes an alternative regimentation of legal statements as carrying metaphysical information about the constitution of legal content and explains how this non-perspectival model makes grounding disagreements in law maximally inclusive and meaningful.

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Triantafyllos Gkouvas
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

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References found in this work

Ought, Agents, and Actions.Mark Schroeder - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (1):1-41.
Ought, Agents, and Actions.Mark Schroeder - 2010 - Philosophical Review 119 (3):1-41.
Defending the wide-scope approach to instrumental reason.Jonathan Way - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 147 (2):213 - 233.
Monism and Material Constitution.Stephen Barker & Mark Jago - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1):189-204.

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