The article attempts to provide a brief account of the ways in which lawyers carry through their arguments concerning some closed moral evaluations or norms and showing how by reference to those norms and evaluations they argue some legal issues as, e.g., the question of the interpretation of legal norms. The author based his reasoning on examples taken from Polish legal literature.

The article presents the ethical conceptions of Czesław Znamierowski, a prominent Polish moral philosopher, professor of general theory of law of University of Poznań. The task of reconstructing Znamierowski’s ideas is rather difficult: his works concerning ethical problems are written with a looseness much unlike thee cautious and priggish style of works presenting the philosophical systems. Moreover, in the course of time his opinions changed in several points.

The application of law means making use of his competence by a subject of law in order to perform in a ”valid” way a definite legal act, basing on a given legal system. The legal act, in a wide meaning of this term, is every act of a conventional character by the adequate performance of which legal obligations of certain subjects, which previously were potentially in force, arise or are actualized. The manner of making use of a granted competence can (...) be unanimously determined, or – and that is of interest in our reasoning – certain limits may be granted to the subject who may decide what use he is willing to make of the awarder competence. (shrink)

The article draws attention to the fact that normative utterances do not describe fragments of the world but due to the fact that they are formulated in certain norm-giving acts they are symptoms of some concurring phenomena. It is quite natural that hearing norms which are proposed by other people we think of them as forms of rational behaviour which are determined by the knowledge and the drives of the people who produce them. This assumption suggests that the fact of (...) enactment of such-and-such a norm is determined by knowledge of the person who proposes the norm. Hence, normative utterances may be considered, without running the risk of a serious fault, symptoms of certain state of affairs or, at least, symptoms of certain conceptions that the norm giver has concerning the states of affairs. (shrink)

This study points to two kinds of relationship between justice and equality: the relationships between the concept of justice and equality, and the relationships between different formulae of justice adopted in social life and the formula of justice based on simple egalitarianism or on the modified formula of egalitarianism. Aristotelian distributive justice postulates identical treatment of similar people, and the controversy arises when it is being decided by virtue of what characteristics similar people are to be treated identically or how (...) differently people should be treated if they possess the relevant characteristic in different degrees. The viable moral doctrines of today accept egalitarian formulae only partially, and for various reasons. The opinions of the society that there is a required dependence of the compound formulae of justice on egalitarian formulae are rather fluid and susceptible to persuasion. (shrink)