Nepřirozené právo

0566706 - ÚSP 2023 RIV CZ cze B - Monografie kniha jako celek
Sobek, Tomáš
Nepřirozené právo.
[Unnatural Law.]
Praha: Ústav státu a práva AV ČR, 2022. 292 s. ISBN 978-80-87439-54-8
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378122
Klíčová slova: jurisprudence * metaethics * legal positivism * expressivism * human rights
Obor OECD: Law

Kniha Nepřirozené právo se věnuje normativním zdrojům práva a morálky. Autor ukazuje, že centrální roli v normativním myšlení hraje pojem kontroly. Když mám něco pod vlastní kontrolou, závisí to na mně. Problém pak je, když nad tím, co by mělo záviset pouze na mně, přebírá kontrolu někdo jiný. V knize se diskutuje řada zajímavých otázek. Co přesně znamená, že právo je lidský artefakt? Potřebujeme vědět, proč bych měli být morální? A potřebujeme vědět, co je zdrojem platnosti práva? Je správné rozhodnout morální dilema na základě počítání lidských životů? Právníci používají tzv. test proporcionality, který poměřuje hodnoty různého druhu. Ale není to jen pověstné srovnávání hrušek s jablky? Každé hodnotové myšlení předpokládá nějaké ideály. Nicméně, je smysluplné se hlásit k ideálům, které jsou tak vysoké, že nejsou reálně dosažitelné? Říká se, že tolerance je typicky liberální ctnost. Skutečně to tak je? Zdá se, že liberální myšlení poskytuje méně prostoru pro toleranci než konzervativní myšlení. Existují lidská práva objektivně? A pokud ano, co přesně to znamená? Lze metafyziku zcela nahradit pragmatickým myšlením? Po přečtení této knihy si čtenář uvědomí, že mnohé odpovědi, které mu přišly samozřejmé, ve skutečnosti samozřejmé nejsou.

This book explores the normative foundations of law and morality. In the first chapter I introduce the problem of rational control, which we will also encounter in the rest of the book. An action can be ascribed to an agent as his or her action only when he or she is in rational control of it. The problem of rational control is ubiquitous in normative practice, but it is also surprisingly undertheorized. I illustrate with specific examples that paraphrasing the conflicting value arguments in terms of control allows us to identify their common denominator. So it turns out that many disagreements ultimately concern which aspect or type of control should be given priority. In the second chapter I will show that legal positivism implicitly uses the concept of rational control. Law is a human artifact not in the sense that it is an arbitrary product of human will, but rather because humans create and reshape the space of legal reasons. The legal practice is primarily a practice of legal reasoning, therefore we should view the creative activity of the legal community through the prism of what qualifies as correct legal reasoning. Law is a human creation only to the extent that humans have rational control over this process. If the space of legal reasons were transformed haphazardly, we could not claim that law is their creation. The next chapter offers an analysis of the very concept of normativity. Morality as a distinctive normative practice does not begin where people have satisfactorily answered the question: Why should I be moral?‘ Rather, morality begins where people indignantly reject this question as inappropriate. And so it is with the law. Law does not begin where people provide a satisfactory answer to the question: ‘What is the ultimate source of legal validity?’ Rather, law as a distinctive normative practice begins where people willingly accept the trivial answer: ‘Our law just applies, period’ The fourth chapter explaines the problem of value incommensurability. Some decisions based on evaluative comparisons are hard because the items being compared appear to be too different to be comparable. I will try to explain that the hardness of the comparison does not have to result from the difference of the items as such. Sometimes it stems from the fact that we are not clear about the practical purpose of the comparison. In other words, I cannot have my decision under rational control until I understand the practical significance of the comparison. The next chapter deals with the problem of aggregation. We want to be masters of our own lives and we also have a moral obligation to enable other people to do the same. On the one hand, we see it as a problem of fairness to compare human interests not only according to their weight but also according to the number of people who hold them. In particular, we feel that it is unfair when a decision is made against a person‘s interest simply because he or she is in the minority. However, if we value every human life as equal, we cannot avoid counting human lives. The appealing thesis that human lives must not be counted because people are not mere objects, while rhetorically attractive, has the effect of overlooking some lives. The topic of the sixth chapter is the significance of value ideals for political and legal thinking. The value ideals are the necessary ingredients of any normative thinking but it is not self-evident what role (if any) we should assign to ideals so high that they are infeasible. People have a tendency to selfish behavior (at least in part) due to their human nature but this empirical fact does not diminish the moral wrongness of selfish behavior. Even if human nature were unchangeable, it would be possible and right to criticize the selfish behavior from the moral point of view. In this sense, even an unachievable ideal can be a standard of moral rightness. However, we need to address practical problems of our real world. If a utopian vision abstracts away from facts about the sources of these problems then it cannot provide us useful guidelines for solving them. In the next chapter I am going to deal with the concept of tolerance. I ask the question: What do we do when we tolerate something? There is a simple answer: To tolerate something means not to disapprove of it. But this answer is wrong because it does not distinguish tolerance from approval and indifference. I will argue that tolerance is a second-order attitude. To tolerate something means to suppress one’s own disapproval of it. Tolerance is based on the ability of an individual to self-control, to endure and to forbear. My approach has a paradoxical consequence. Tolerance is traditionally understood as a typically liberal attitude or virtue. But when we properly understand the concept of tolerance, we will see that tolerance has a limited role to play in a liberal society. This paradoxical consequence can be resolved by distinguishing positive and negative liberalism. You can be a liberal person in virtue of your liberal views and/ or in virtue of your tolerance. Moral objectivity can be understood in different ways. In the last chapter I will compare twe approaches. The metaphysical realism presupposes a strong conception of moral objectivity. According to this view, human rights are not only morally justified claims of people, but they are somehow built into the world itself. On the other hand, the expressivism prefers a weaker conception of moral objectivity which can be explained by the very nature of moral reasoning. In any process of moral justification, speakers express their moral attitudes that presuppose the claim to objectivity. The disadvantage of metaphysical realism is the epistemic uncertainty about the existence and content of moral reality. This permanent doubt has a perilous potential to slip into deep moral scepticism. I will conclude that human rights are objective at least in the weaker sense. The objectivity of human rights is nothing supernatural, it is an entirely human matter. This weak conception of objectivity is not encoded in non-natural reality, but rather in the way we think and talk about human rights.
Trvalý link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0338010