thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
least in some cases the unacceptability of a norm entails its inefficacy, then at least in some cases sanctions that are unacceptable would also be inefficacious. It would happen not only in cases where sanctions are inhumane or disproportional, but also in cases where the sanction punishes the disobedience to an unacceptable norm of behavior. If the behavior commanded by the norm is unacceptable, then a sanction punishing the disobedience to such norm would also be unacceptable. If in some cases unacceptable norms of behavior can become inefficacious, then the unacceptable sanctions punishing those who disobey such norms cannot wait for a better fate. Otherwise we would be counting on totally cold-hearted sanction enforcers, capable of applying any sanction no matter how unacceptable it is, but, if we could appeal to fictional beings like that, we would have no reason not to appeal instead to perfectly obedient addressees, capable of obeying norms of behavior no matter how unacceptable they are. Fictions could have solved our problems many steps earlier. If, however, we are not fictionalizing, then the assumption that all sanction enforcers are totally cold-hearted is, to say the least, very unlikely to be true. Thus, sanctions would also depend on their efficacy, which would also in at least some cases depend on their content; therefore, efficacy, with or without sanction, would keep not being a formal requisite.If that is right, we can not only come to the conclusion that efficacy cannot be a formal requisite, but we can invert that conclusion against Kelsens purposes and say that, introducing efficacy as a requisite for validity, Kelsen sheltered a material wolf covert with sheeps formal clothing. For saying that every content can be valid law, but, in order to be valid law, that content must be efficacious is tantamount to saying that, as not every content can be efficacious, not every content can be valid law. And any theory that recognizes that is not a formalistic theory anymore.
One main argument with which legal positivists as Bentham, Austin, and Kelsen thought to have dismissed Natural Law theories is that a legal theory must be descriptive, that is, it must show the law as it really is, instead of judging it as good or bad or speaking of a law that ought to be. This argument was supposed to dismiss in one fell swoop all Natural Law theories, because these theories were believed to present a just law as a model of reference and to state that the existing law would be valid only to the extent it would correspond to that just law. They would, therefore, be prescriptive, instead of descriptive. Finnis takes the requisite of descriptiveness as correct, but not dismissive of Natural Law in any way. He tries to show that Natural Law theories can meet that requisite as well as positivist theories do or even better than they do. According to Finnis, Natural Law theories are not actually prescriptive, but descriptive. They do not speak of a law that ought to be, but of a law that is. The difference is that they describe the law that is with respect to the law that it intends to be and that would not be a theoretical artifice to disguise a prescriptive theory as a descriptive one, but a necessary feature of any theory dedicated to social institutions.Finniss defense of the descriptiveness of Natural Law theories depends on an allegedly necessary shift in our everyday concept of description. We are used to think of describing as the activity of reporting how something is without adding or omitting anything and without judging if it is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, useful or harmful. However, things made by men with some purpose (purposeful things) can be described only with respect to the purpose they intend to reach. The Victory of Samothrace can be described as an incomplete statue, that lacks head and arms, only because we consider it to represent the Goddess Victory and, in order to represent Her properly, it would have to have head and arms. Describing it as the representation of a headless and armless Goddess would not be true, but we know that only because we compare what we see to what we suppose that it intended to be. The same would hold for social institutions. They are also purposeful things, because a marriage or a contract are not merely things that we do, but also things that we do in order to get something else. Two people marry each other to cherish their love, to have a life and estate together and to protect their children. Two people contract to each other to pursue their common interest and protect their relation from ulterior and external interference. It would be impossible to describe a particular marriage or a particular contract without considering what that particular institution intended to be. That, of course, makes a lot of sense. But Finnis is prepared to make the same kind of statement about law in general. Law, as the social
institution it is, would be a purposeful thing too. Its purpose would be to protect and realize the basic goods of human life. Once we had a list of these goods, we could describe law properly, with respect to what it intends to be, that is, with respect to the version of law that best protects and realizes those goods. This version is nothing else than what thinkers as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Finnis himself call the Natural Law. In short: Purposeful things have to be described with respect to what they intend to be; as law is a purposeful thing and it intends to be the best protection and realization of the basic goods of human life, it has to be described with respect to that version of law that best protects and realizes those basic goods, which happens to be Natural Law. I would like to propose a criticism of that argument. Here it follows. One reason Finnis offers to justify his thesis of purpose-sensitive descriptions for purposeful things is that no description is a report of all features of the described, but only of some of its features, therefore, always involving selection. As every selection has to follow a certain criterion, Finnis sustains that, in the description of purposeful things, the purpose of the described is the necessary criterion for selection of features suited for describing it. Well, my criticism will tackle exactly that necessary criterion argument. I accept that every description involves selection and every selection needs a criterion, but I deny that there is any necessary criterion for the selection of features aimed at describing something. On the contrary, I defend that the criterion for selection is not necessarily the purpose of the described, but the purpose of the description or, if you prefer so, the purpose of the describer. Imagine that, for very unaccountable reasons, the Victory of Samothrace were transferred from the Louvre Museum towards the Emilio Goeldi Museum (a museum in my birth town, unfortunately not as famous as Louvre concerning Art works), and that the latter, for very accountable reasons, was suspicious of being mocked and afraid that the transferred statue were not the real one. For preventing public shame, Goeldis curator would hire an assessor, someone with expertise in classic art, in order to determine whether the delivered statue were the famous Victory of Samothrace. That expert, together with his entourage, would inspect the statue in every possible way, measuring its dimensions, scrutinizing its details with magnifiers, examining its shapes and colors against dark light, and making many other weird procedures that I and you could not even imagine of. In the end, the expert would hand over a final report, which would consist in a description of the statue, followed by an assessment of it being or not the original one. Once the description would serve as basis for the assessment, it would be expected that the selection of features would not concentrate in what the statue were sculpted to be, but in how much the delivered statue is similar to the
original one. In that approach, the delivered statues lacking of head and arms would be taken as a sign of its being complete, and not incomplete or, if you prefer so, of its being as incomplete as it was supposed to be. On the contrary, if it were provided with head and arms, that would be a sign of its having been altered or, worse than that, a sign for turn on the red light of international art mockery. That unnecessarily long example leads to two conclusions: one, Belenenses are very suspicious and afraid of ridicule, and two the one that is really relevant for my criticism descriptions are dependent not on the purpose of the described, but on the purpose of the describer. The same would hold for law. A legal practitioner, a legal sociologist, a legal psychologist and a legal economist would describe law in different ways, and still their descriptions could all be true, with respect to different purposes. All of them would also describe law in a way very different from how a legal philosopher would do it, and still none of their descriptions would have epistemic precedence over each other. Among legal philosophers it would not be different. A legal positivist and a Natural Law theorist would be concerned with very different features of the existing law, not because one of them is right and the other wrong, but because they have very different purposes with their descriptions. There is no necessary criterion for the selection of features in order to describe something or else there wouldnt be but one kind and one purpose of description , there are only pragmatic or instrumental criteria, used according to the descriptive purposes of the time. The descriptive report of an Art historian and that of an Art assessor about the same Art work would hardly coincide, then why should be different with the descriptive reports of a legal positivist and a Natural Law theorist about the same existing law? If, as I defend, the purposes relevant for the selection of features in a description are the describers, then that purpose of protecting and realizing the basic goods of the human life is not necessary for legal theory in general, but only relevant for Finnis (and his fellow Aquinasian companions) in particular. And it is relevant for him (them) for its potential to evaluate and criticize the existing law and to propose amendments and changes to it. If Finnis explicitly refers to the importance of point of view selection concerning the addresses of law, he does not give the same attention to the point of view selection concerning the legal theorist. For the legal positivist, assuming the point of view of the legal practitioner, is mostly concerned with what the existing law presently says and the Natural Law theorist, assuming the point of view of the legislator, or of his knowledgeable advisor, is chiefly occupied with in which aspects the existing law can be improved for the best. So, I would criticize not only Finniss insistence that there is a
necessary criterion for description of social institutions, but also Finniss failure to distinguish between different purposes and point of views of description. Having made that kind of distinction would have allowed for Finnis to perceive that, when Bentham, Austin, and Kelsen rejected non-descriptive approaches to law, their reasons of rejection could be extended to descriptive approaches from the point of view of the legislator. In their opinion, the point of view of those who obey and apply the existing law, without having any power to create or change it, is the only relevant perspective for a theory of law. Attacking the monopoly of this point of view would have been a much better strategy for Finnis than defending a particular kind of description as right and necessary.
Most contemporary philosophers explain the normativity ofpromises with one of these two strategies: conventionalists say that promisesbind because there is a conventional practice (bearing normative meaning) ofmaking promises and every actor whose utterance meets the requirements of thatpractice is obligated to do what he or she has said; expectationalists say thatpromises bind because they raise expectations of fulfillment and (at least inmost of the cases) it would be wrong for an actor to disappoint expectations thathe or she raised. What I want to examine in this post is whether wagers can beconsidered to bind in the same way that promises can and for the same reasonstoo. In order to know that, I will compare wagers and promises and see whetherthey are sufficiently similar to each other. For the sake of this post, I willconsider both strategies successful and will establish that, in defending that some institution is similar to apromise, said similarity can hold either by the conventionalist or the expectationalistconception of promises.As for wagers, they bear the following intuitive similarityto promises. If I bet with you that,if your team wins the game, I will buy you a beer, that appears to be tantamount to me promising that, if your team wins the game, I will buy you a beer.In this treatment, a wager looks like a case of a conditional promise, apromise whose obligation is conditioned to a hypothetical fact, a promise inthe form ifthen. (The fact that this kind of wager is usually made with a reciprocityclause, such as but if mine wins, you buy me a beer, is not a real problem,because it would just be a case of two promises, each one made by each of thebetters and intertwined with each other. For the sake of simplicity, I willconsider only the case of unilateral wagers, where the first better iscommitted to do something for the second one if the condition obtains, but the secondbetter is not committed to do something for the first one if the condition doesnot obtain.) That intuitive similarity between a wager and a conditional promiseis the departing point to our analysis.There is, however, at least two important differencesbetween a wager and a conditional promise. The first one is that, in a wager,the disbelief of the first better in that the condition will obtain is implicitin the wager proposal itself, while a similar disbelief is not necessary in aconditional promise. Betting that I will buy you a beer if your team wins thegame suggests that I have a considerable disbelief that your team will in factwin the game. My utterance implies the prediction that your team will not winthe game and, to show how confident I am in my prediction, I am even willing tobuy you a beer if the future does not confirm it. On the other hand, by sayingsomething like: Lets watch the game together in a bar, I promise you that, ifyour team wins the game, I will buy a beer, I do not imply that I dontbelieve that your team will win the game, but, on the contrary, I believe thatit
is at least one of the possibilities and commit myself that, if thathappens, I will buy a beer. For making the difference still more evident, youcan think of a father that knows that his son will apply for a place in a prestigiousuniversity. If the father says: I promise you that, if you get the place, Iwill give you a car, that is a kind of incentive, but if he says: I bet withyou that, if you get the place, I will give you a car, that is a kind ofdiscouragement, or even an offensive challenge.The second difference between a wager and a conditionalpromise is that, in a wager, both betters position themselves in a competitionpicture, in a win-lose situation. If I bet with you that, if your team wins thegame, I will buy you a beer, and it turns out that your team does win the gameand I do have to buy you a beer, as said in the wager proposal, then I havesuffered a kind of loss and you are even expected to feel free to mock me forthat. But the same would be strange for a promise. If I promised you that, ifyour team won the game, I would buy you a bear and it turned out that your teamdid win the game and I did have to buy you a beer, it is only the fulfillmentof a promise, for your teams winning the game was something that I hadexpected to possibly happen and my having to buy you a beer was something thatI even wanted to do if your team won (which is kind of a win-win situation).There would be no reason to mock me for that; maybe there is even place tothank me in a way for having made that promise and for having complied with itin the end.In my point of view, those two differences have distinctimpacts on the similarity between wagers and promises according to the choicefor the conventionalist or the expectationalist strategy to explain promises. Fromthe point of view of the conventionalist strategy, those two differences looklike sufficient reasons to infer that, even if wagering is a practice, in thesame sense that promising is, it is notthe same practice as promising. It would be a different practice, one thatwould have different rules and requirements and would call for a different justification.But from the point of view of the expectationalist strategy, whatever thedifferences between wagering and promising, there would be no denying that awager, similarly to a promise, raise expectations that would be wrong not tofulfill. We could think of wagering and promising as two different cases (oneinvolving a challenge and a win-lose situation, the other involving help orfavor and a win-win situation) of the same moral phenomenon, that is, of theexpectation-raising behavior. It would be matter for an ulterior investigationto know whether this conclusion shows an advantage of the expectationalist strategy(the range of its classification, going beyond promises and encompassing otherbehaviors, for example, wagers) that should be taken into account as anepistemic reason to favor it over the conventionalist one. Another matter foran ulterior
This Blog is quite experimental. I've got another Blog, named "Filosofo Grego", written in Portuguese and dedicated to contemporary philosophy. The Blog is relatively well known, but in recent times I have been writing some material in English that, put in the context of the former Blog, was a little too different. So the idea of a Blog in English would be nothing but natural. Let's see if this attempt will succeed. This recording is a register of my presentation in July 25th in my Workshop of the IVR Congress 2013. The title of the presentation is "The Tension Between Facticity and Validity in the Judicial Procedure" and it deals with Habermas's theory of law and democracy in Between Facts and Norms, trying to develop his approach to the judicial procedure to the point that it can explain and evaluate critically the major trends of our time concerning procedural law. This presentation pretty much summarizes the main points of my future doctoral thesis and, because of that, any comment or sugestion will be extremely welcome in this step of the way. So that's enough for introduction and let's skip to the real thing. In the Dworkinian conception of a right (right as a kind of trump), does A has a right to free speech means that the political objective of A having free speech ought to prevail over almost every other political objective, except for other rights heavier than As right to free speech and for social ends with acutely high urgency or relevance? Wouldnt that mean that A ought to have as much free speech as morally possible?I know that Dworkins definition is more of an interpretive conception of rights and their status in the general frame of political objectives, and not a semantic analysis of what means to have a right, but I was thinking that, if the translation above is right, then in Dworkin the principle that everyone should have the widest system of freedom would not be a demand of justice about rights (as in Rawls), but would rather be contained in the very concept of rights. It would be conceptually impossible for a legal system to recourse to the idea of rights without intending to grant everyone the widest system of freedom. In a way, Harts criticism of Rawlss formulation and lexical priority of the first principle of justice (stating that both would be chosen only by individuals animated by liberalism as an ideal of life, something that the parties in the original position are not supposed to be) would apply even more properly to Dworkins conception of rights.(But wouldnt Dworkin defend himself by saying that he never meant to merely describe what is a right, because that is impossible, he meant instead to provide an interpretation of rights, which, according to his ideas, must necessarily commit itself to a normative ideal? So he was not trying to sketch a definition of rights with which rational parties under the veil of ignorance would agree, but rather an interpretation of rights that would both explain and justify our
political practices, making them as morally appealing as possible. But even if we accept what he says that interpreting implies, wouldnt a thinner conception of rights, one not committed from the start with the principle of the widest system of freedom, be explanatorily more powerful and meta-ethically more pluralistic?)
aqueles que comprovam carencia socioeconomica. Alunos que tenham bolsa integral em escolas particulares tambem podem requerer o nao-pagamento da inscricao.Sobre inscricao: Quando fizer a inscricao o aluno devera inserir seu CPF e data de nascimento. Depois devera fornecer outras informacoes. No ato da inscricao o candidato podera escolher qual a lingua estrangeira de sua prova (Ingles ou Espanhol). E necessario estar atento a todos os detalhes na inscricao.Diploma do ensino medio:E nesse momento da inscricao tambem que quem necessita atendimento especial devera especificar.Se o candidato quiser obter o diploma de ensino medio atraves do Enem, devera tambem marcar isso no devido espaco do ato de inscricao.Dificuldade para fazer inscricoes:Centenas de milhares de candidatos estao com dificuldades para ter acesso ao site do INEP e realizar a inscricao para o Enem. Isso acontece por conda do alto numero de candidatos que querem se inscrever ao mesmo tempo. E sugerido que o acesso seja feito durante a madrugada pois durante o dia tem sido muito dificil.