Papers by Triantafyllos Gkouvas
Ethics, Medicine and Public Health, 2020
In his very thorough analysis of the normative impact of legal directives on the morality of acti... more In his very thorough analysis of the normative impact of legal directives on the morality of actions of medical professionals, Kenneth Ehrenberg portrays in a jurisprudentially elaborate way the legal limits of pursuing compossible ends in the domain of medical professional action. In some cases, Ehrenberg argues, compliance with a legitimate legal requirement and compliance with one's best medical judgment, are not practically compossible and complicity with a legitimate legal directive would be morally justified where the non-medical considerations upon which the directive was based are ones that would themselves undermine the physician's pre-existing moral duty to treat the patient. In this brief response, I will outline the jurisprudential framework within which Ehrenberg's argument operates followed by a short digression in the broader domain of discourse regarding the instrumentality of action. More precisely, I will confine my remarks to certain parameters that I take to be critical in ensuring that a Razian model of legal authority hits its desired target unembarrassed by rejoinders originating from theories of law that similarly aspire to inject teleological arguments in the justification of political legitimacy and the normativity of law.
The Place of Coercion in Law
The question of whether coercion is a necessary or contingent feature of governance by law is a h... more The question of whether coercion is a necessary or contingent feature of governance by law is a historically complex aspect of a venerable 'modalist' trend in jurisprudential thinking. The nature of the relation between law and coercion has been elaborated by means of a variety of modally qualified accounts, all converging in a more or less committing response to whether the language, concept or essence of law as a system of governance necessarily entails the coercive character of this system. This Element remodels in non-modal terms the way in which legal philosophers can meaningfully disagree about the coercive character of governance by law. On this alternative model, there can be no meaningful disagreement about whether law is coercive without prior agreement on the contours of a theory of how law is made.
What makes law law: categorial trends in analytic legal metaphysics
Jurisprudence, Jul 10, 2023
Appeals to metaphysics have lately come to ascendancy in analytic legal philosophy. Over the last... more Appeals to metaphysics have lately come to ascendancy in analytic legal philosophy. Over the last 20 years or so, a new discourse framework has emerged in analytic legal metaphysics that focusses on the explanatory question of how law is made. By any measure the most influential refinement of this question is to be found in Mark Greenberg's seminal 2004 article How Facts Make Law. This essay tries to exert some pressure on this familiar question by posing the categorial question of what type of entities different theories of law take up as ontologically basic for their inquiry. The essay singles out four exemplary avenues for answering the categorial question. Introducing a categorial instead of explanatory lens is an overdue step in the process of updating the metaphysical toolbox of contemporary analytic theories of law. The categorial question of what kind of entity law is ismeant to complement the explanatory question of how law is made in a way that makes disagreements about the metaphysical-explanatory demands of theories of law more tractable or amenable to principled adjudication.
Law's Humility: Enlarging the Scope of Jurisprudential Disagreement
EUNOMÍA. Revista en Cultura de la Legalidad
In this essay I argue that the use of constitutivist arguments for explaining the normativity of ... more In this essay I argue that the use of constitutivist arguments for explaining the normativity of conventional requirements is one step ahead of what needs to be accounted for in the first place which is the following: is the normative force of practice-based requirements a matter of practical reasons? If practical reasons are indeed the kind of entity that do the requisite work, then constitutivism about such practical reasons may indeed be a promising contender for the normativity of social practices. But settling the question of whether a constitutivist account of practice-immanent reasons is explanatorily potent is methodologically prior to settling the question of whether reasons as such are the most suitable normative concept for making sense of the normative mechanics of social normativity. This prior question is rarely treated as a conceptual precursor to any discussion about the normativity of social practices. My timid proposal will be to consider the possibility that the normativity of social practices is more akin to the normativity of formal rationality than to the normativity of practical reasons.
El carácter práctico de la razón pura. Una defensa normativa de la teoría kantiana de la motivación moral. [Inglés]
Eidos, Jul 15, 2011
El proposito de este trabajo es defender la opinion que Kant ha propuesto sobre la teoria interna... more El proposito de este trabajo es defender la opinion que Kant ha propuesto sobre la teoria internalista de la motivacion moral. En particular, argumentare que la adopcion de Kant de internalismo se evidencia en su afirmacion de que la relacion de la razon pura de la voluntad se basa en una practica una proposicion sintetica a priori. Lo que se pretende demostrar es que Kant trata la sinteticidad practica como un concepto fundamental para su relato de lo que significa ser motivados por los principios de la razon pura. En mi conceptualizacion de la teoria motivacional de Kant, la relacion entre las maximas universalizables y el interes moral de actuar sobre ellos es necesaria pero no tautologica, ya que violaciones de los derechos son logicamente posibles a pesar de que tengamos una razon moral de actuar. Lo que impide que este ultimo argumento colapse en una cuenta casi externalista de la motivacion moral es que el impacto de motivacion de las maximas como la ley, es en ultima instancia, la premisa de una concepcion normativa de nosotros mismos como agentes libres.
Eidos, 2011
The purpose of this paper is to defend the view that Kant has propounded an internalist theory of... more The purpose of this paper is to defend the view that Kant has propounded an internalist theory of moral motivation. In particular, I shall argue that Kant's espousal of internalism is evidenced by his claim that pure reason's relation to the will is premised on a practical synthetic a priori proposition. What I aim to demonstrate is that Kant treated practical syntheticity as a pivotal concept for his account of what it means to be motivated by principles of pure reason. On my construal of Kant's motivational theory, the relation between universalizable maxims and the moral interest to act upon them is necessary but non-tautological, since violations of duty are logically possible despite our having a moral reason to act. What prevents the latter argument from collapsing into a quasiexternalist account of moral motivation is that the motivational impact of law-like maxims is ultimately premised on a normative conception of ourselves as free agents.
This thesis propounds a metatheoretical regimentation of legal claims that can accommodate theore... more This thesis propounds a metatheoretical regimentation of legal claims that can accommodate theoretical disagreement across the board. The solution explored does not question the incommensurability between the descriptive and the normative variants of first-order disputes about the grounds of law. What it targets instead is an unpronounced agnosticism about the possibility of a more inclusive type of metajurisprudential disagreement that does not take for granted either the existence of legal facts—construed either as descriptive or as normative facts about what the law requires—as the trivial truthmakers of propositions of law or their potentially reason-giving properties. On the assumption that the fact that for every legal proposition there is something in the world that makes it true is a premise shared by all legal philosophers but those of an expressivist inclination, an unpronounced, primitive division of opinion occurs as early as one ventures to question that our commitment ...
Resisting Perspectivalism about Law: The Scope of Jurisprudential Disagreement
Jurisprudence, 2016
Even though the acknowledgment of the possibility of disagreement about the grounds of legal fact... more 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.
The Practicality of Pure Reason
Eidos, 2011
El proposito de este trabajo es defender la opinion que Kant ha propuesto sobre la teoria interna... more El proposito de este trabajo es defender la opinion que Kant ha propuesto sobre la teoria internalista de la motivacion moral. En particular, argumentare que la adopcion de Kant de internalismo se evidencia en su afirmacion de que la relacion de la razon pura de la voluntad se basa en una practica una proposicion sintetica a priori. Lo que se pretende demostrar es que Kant trata la sinteticidad practica como un concepto fundamental para su relato de lo que significa ser motivados por los principios de la razon pura. En mi conceptualizacion de la teoria motivacional de Kant, la relacion entre las maximas universalizables y el interes moral de actuar sobre ellos es necesaria pero no tautologica, ya que violaciones de los derechos son logicamente posibles a pesar de que tengamos una razon moral de actuar. Lo que impide que este ultimo argumento colapse en una cuenta casi externalista de la motivacion moral es que el impacto de motivacion de las maximas como la ley, es en ultima instanc...
The Metric Approach to Legal Normativity
Preliminary remarks on a theory of legal normativity
... discursive theory of law. Pavlakos, George (Ratio juris; 1998). Law, normativity and the mode... more ... discursive theory of law. Pavlakos, George (Ratio juris; 1998). Law, normativity and the model of norms. Pavlakos, George (in: The normative dimension of law / Pavlakos, George [edit]; ea [edit]; 2011). Practice, reasons, and the ...
Trust in Law
Some basic empirical acquaintance with the operations of legal systems is sufficient to render vi... more Some basic empirical acquaintance with the operations of legal systems is sufficient to render visible the presence of issues of trust across a continuum flanked by legal doctrine on one side and l ...
El carácter práctico de la razón pura.: una defensa normativa de la teoría kantiana de la motivación moral
El proposito de este trabajo es defender la opinion que Kant ha propuesto sobre la teoria interna... more El proposito de este trabajo es defender la opinion que Kant ha propuesto sobre la teoria internalista de la motivacion moral. En particular, argumentare que la adopcion de Kant de internalismo se evidencia en su afirmacion de que la relacion de la razon pura de la voluntad se basa en una practica una proposicion sintetica a priori. Lo que se pretende demostrar es que Kant trata la sinteticidad practica como un concepto fundamental para su relato de lo que significa ser motivados por los principios de la razon pura. En mi conceptualizacion de la teoria motivacional de Kant, la relacion entre las maximas universalizables y el interes moral de actuar sobre ellos es necesaria pero no tautologica, ya que violaciones de los derechos son logicamente posibles a pesar de que tengamos una razon moral de actuar. Lo que impide que este ultimo argumento colapse en una cuenta casi externalista de la motivacion moral es que el impacto de motivacion de las maximas como la ley, es en ultima instanc...
Planning from a Legal Point of View
Jurisprudence, 2016
Eidos Revista De Filosofia De La Universidad Del Norte, Jun 1, 2011
El propósito de este trabajo es defender la opinión que Kant ha propuesto sobre la teoría interna... more El propósito de este trabajo es defender la opinión que Kant ha propuesto sobre la teoría internalista de la motivación moral. En particular, argumentaré que la adopción de Kant de internalismo se evidencia en su afirmación de que la relación de la razón pura de la voluntad se basa en una práctica una proposición sintética a priori. Lo que se pretende demostrar es que Kant trata la sinteticidad práctica como un concepto fundamental para su relato de lo que significa ser motivados por los principios de la razón pura. En mi conceptuali zación de la teoría motivacional de Kant, la relación entre las máximas universalizables y el interés moral de actuar sobre ellos es necesaria pero no tautológica, ya que violaciones de los derechos son lógicamente posibles a pesar de que tengamos una razón moral de actuar. Lo que impide que este último argumento colapse en una cuenta casi externalista de la motivación moral es que el impacto de motivación de las máximas como la ley, es en última instancia, la premisa de una concepción normativa de nosotros mismos como agentes libres. p a l a b r a s c l a v e Motivación moral, juicio moral, razón pura, voluntad, autonomía. a b s T r a c T
Beyond the Legal Vernacular: Linguistic Content, Truth and Strategy in Legal Discourse
Jurisprudence, 2015
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Papers by Triantafyllos Gkouvas