From Ethical Analysis to Legal Reform
Methodological Reflections on Ethical Transplants in Pluralist Contexts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3384/de-ethica.2001-8819.227141Keywords:
applied ethics, legal reform, ethical transplants, pluralism, methodology, ethical triangulationAbstract
Ethical analysis may result in recommendations for legal reform. This article discusses the problem of how academic researchers can go from ethical normative judgments to recommendations for law reform. It develops a methodological framework for what may be called ‘ethical transplants’: transplanting ethical normative judgments into legislation. It is an inventory of the issues that need to be addressed, but not a substantive normative theory. It may be especially helpful for Ph.D. students and beginning researchers working in interdisciplinary projects combining ethical and legal analysis.
I distinguish three stages in the process from ethics to law: translation, transformation, and incorporation. The latter stage can be divided into three clusters of issues, these being legal, empirical, and normative ones. Most of the philosophical literature on the legal enforcement of morals focuses on the normative issues. My aim is to broaden the perspective in two ways. First, I show that this is only one relevant issue and that we should address legal and empirical issues and the processes of translation and transformation as well. Second, I argue that we should pay more attention to pluralism and variation.
References
Alexy, Robert, ‘The Dual Nature of Law’, Ratio Juris 23(2010), 167-182.
Austin, John, Lectures on Jurisprudence (ed. Campbell, R.), London: John Murray, 1885[1863].
Baker, Deane-Peter, ‘Making Good Better: A Proposal for Teaching Ethics at the Service Academies’, Journal of Military Ethics 11(2012)3, 208-222.
Barton-Crosby, Jennifer, ‘The nature and role of morality in situational action theory’, European Journal of Criminology, (2020) DOI: 10.1177/1477370820977099
Beauchamp, Tom L. and Childress, James F., Principles of Biomedical Ethics, New York: Oxford University Press 1979.
Berman, Paul Schiff (ed.), Oxford Handbook on Global Legal Pluralism, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020.
Boutellier, Hans, A Criminology of Moral Order, Bristol: Bristol University Press 2020
Cane, Peter, Responsibility in Law and Morality, Oxford: Hart Publishing 2002.
Chamizo Dom??nguez, Pedro J., and Nerlich, Brigitte, ‘False friends: their origin and semantics in some selected languages,’ Journal of Pragmatics, 34(2002)12, 1833-1849.
Cotterrell, Roger, Law’s Community. Legal Theory in Sociological Perspective, Oxford: Clarendon 1995.
Cotterrell, Roger, The Sociology of Law. An Introduction, London: Butterworths 1992.
Devlin, Patrick, The Enforcement of Morals, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1965.
Dickson, Julie, Evaluation and Legal Theory, Oxford: Hart Publishing 2001.
Dworkin, Roger B., Limits. The Role of Law in Bioethical Decision Making, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1978.
Dworkin, Ronald, Law’s Empire, London: Fontana 1986.
Dworkin, Ronald, Justice for Hedgehogs, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press 2011.
Feinberg, Joel, Harm to Others. The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Volume One, New York: Oxford University Press 1984.
Feinberg, Joel, Offence to Others. The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Volume Two, New York: Oxford University Press 1985.
Feinberg, Joel, Harm to Self. The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Volume Three, New York: Oxford University Press 1986.
Feinberg, Joel, Harmless Wrongdoing. The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Volume Four, New York: Oxford University Press 1990.
Fennell, David A. and Malloy, David C., ‘Ethics and Ecotourism: A Comprehensive Ethical Model’, Journal of Applied Recreation Research, 20(1995)3, 163-183.
Fredman, Sandra, Intersectional discrimination in EU gender equality and non-discrimination law, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union 2016.
Fuller, Lon L., ‘Reason and Fiat in Case Law’, Harvard Law Review 59(1946), 376-395.
Fuller, Lon L., The Morality of Law, New Haven: Yale University Press 1969[1964].
Fuller, Lon L., The Principles of Social Order. Selected Essays of Lon L. Fuller (edited by Winston, Kenneth I.), Oxford: Hart Publishing 2001[1981].
Gaakeer, Jeanne, ‘Iudex Translator: the reign of finitude’, in Pier Giuseppe Monateri (ed.), Methods of Comparative Law, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar 2012, 252-269.
George, Robert P., Making Men Moral. Civil Liberties and Public Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Greenawalt, Kent, ‘Legal Enforcement of Morality’ in: Patterson, Dennis (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Oxford: Blackwell 1996, 475-487
Hart, H.L.A., Law, Liberty and Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1963.
Hart, H.L.A., The Concept of Law, Oxford: Clarendon 1994[1961].
Husak, Douglas N., ‘Drugs: Moral and Legal Issues’ in: Chadwick, Ruth (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Applied Ethics, Volume 1, Academic Press 1998, 849-858.
Joppke, Christian, ‘Islam and the Legal Enforcement of Morality’, Theory and Society 43(2014)6, 589-615.
Kuhse, Helga et al., ‘End?of?life decisions in Australian medical practice’. Medical Journal of Australia 166(1997)4, 191-196.
Mampuys, Ruth, The deadlock in European GM Crop Authorisations as a Wicked Problem by Design. A Need for Repoliticisation of the Decision-Making Process (diss. Erasmus University Rotterdam) 2021.
Moss, Kate and Hughes, Rowland, ‘Hart–Devlin revisited: law, morality and consent in parenthood’, Medicine, Science and the Law, 51(2011)2, 68-75.
Radbruch, Gustav, Rechtsphilosophie (hrsg. Erik Wolf und Hans-Peter Schneider) Stuttgart: K.F. Koehler 1973[1932].
Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999[1971].
Raz, Joseph, Practical Reason and Norms, London: Hutchinson 1975.
Raz, Joseph, ‘The Rule of Law and its Virtue’, in: The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1979, 210-229.
Robeyns, Ingrid, ‘Ideal Theory in Theory and Practice’, Social Theory and Practice, 34(2008)3, 341–362. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23558712.
Selznick, Philip, ‘Sociology and Natural Law’, Natural Law Forum 6(1961), 84-108.
Shiner, Roger A., ‘Law and Morality’ in: Patterson, Dennis (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Oxford: Blackwell 1996, 436-449.
Shklar, Judith N., Legalism. Law, Morals, and Political Trials, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1964.
Siems, Mathias, Comparative Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014.
Skolnick, Jerome H., ‘Coercion to Virtue’, Southern California Law Review, 41(1968)3, 588-641.
Taekema, Sanne, The Concept of Ideals in Legal Theory, The Hague: Kluwer Law International 2003.
Thaler, Richard H. and Sunstein, Cass R., Nudge. Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, London: Penguin 2009.
van der Burg, Wibren, ‘Bioethics and Law. A Developmental Perspective’, Bioethics 11(1997), 91-115.
van der Burg, Wibren, ‘The Expressive and the Communicative Functions of Law’, Law and Philosophy, 20(2001)1, 31-59.
van der Burg, Wibren, ‘Law and Ethics: The Twin Disciplines’, in: Bart van Klink & Sanne Taekema (eds.), Law and Method. Interdisciplinary Research into Law, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, 175-194.
van der Burg, Wibren, The Dynamics of Law and Morality. A Pluralist Account of Legal Interactionism, Farnham: Ashgate 2014.
van der Burg, Wibren, ‘The Merits of Law. An Argumentative Framework for Evaluative Judgments and Normative Recommendations in Legal Research’, Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, 105(2019)1, 11-43.
van Klink, Bart, van Beers, Britta and Poort, Lonneke (eds.), Symbolic Legislation: Theory and Developments in Biolaw, Dordrecht: Springer 2016.
Warnock, Mary, ‘Moral Thinking and Government Policy: The Warnock Committee on Human Embryology’, The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly: Health and Society, 63(1985)3 504-522.
Watson, Alan, Legal Transplants. An Approach to Comparative Law, Athens and London: University of Georgia Press 1993[1994].
Williams, Bernard (ed.), Obscenity and film censorship: An abridgement of the Williams report. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (transl. Anscombe, G.E.M.), Malden, Mass.: Blackwell 2001.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Wibren van der Burg
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
