A Pragmatic Reconstruction of Law's Claim to Authority

Horacio Spector
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

Raz holds that necessarily all legal authorities, even de facto authorities, make a claim to legitimate authority. He does not say that legitimacy is a necessary property of law. This view, which I call the claim view, constitutes my focal point in this paper. Many commentators have criticized this view. I discuss and dismiss three critiques of the claim view: the verification critique (the claim view is not empirically confirmed), the legalistic critique (law claims legal authority, not moral authority), and the semantic critique (legal obligations are semantically distinct from moral obligations). I submit that Raz equates the meaning of legal duties with that of moral duties and yet denies that legal statements entail moral propositions. In other words, I distinguish the semantic identity thesis from the semantic entailment thesis. Instead of a semantic interpretation of the claim view, I defend a presuppositional ascription of a general claim to moral authority to authoritative duty‐imposing and normatively committed uses of legal language by official spokesmen. I show that law’s claim to authority does not prove the truth of the sources thesis, because conceptual confusion or insincerity can affect the epistemic reliability of the propositions embodied in the claim, and because blatant immorality can altogether cancel law’s pragmatically presupposed claim to moral authority. I also argue that the claim view can only warrant two qualified versions of exclusive legal positivism, one of which is almost tautological, the other self‐contradictory. Finally, I suggest that exclusive legal positivism cannot be defended on conceptual grounds.
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法律权威主张的语用重建
拉兹认为,所有的法律权威,甚至事实上的权威,都必须声称自己是合法的权威。他并没有说合法性是法律的必要属性。这种观点,我称之为主张观点,构成了本文的重点。许多评论家批评了这种观点。我讨论并驳斥了对权利要求观的三种批评:验证批评(权利要求观没有得到经验证实)、法律主义批评(法律要求法律权威,而不是道德权威)和语义批评(法律义务在语义上与道德义务不同)。我认为拉兹将法律义务的含义等同于道德义务的含义,但否认法律陈述包含道德命题。换句话说,我将语义同一性论题与语义蕴涵论题区分开来。我不是对主张观点进行语义上的解释,而是为一种预设的观点辩护,即把对道德权威的一般主张归于权威责任,即官方发言人强制使用和规范地使用法律语言。我表明,法律对权威的主张并不能证明来源命题的真实性,因为概念上的混乱或不真诚会影响该主张中所体现的命题的认识论可靠性,而且因为公然的不道德可以完全取消法律在实用上预设的道德权威主张。我还认为,主张观点只能证明排他性法律实证主义的两个限定版本,其中一个几乎是同义反复的,另一个则是自相矛盾的。最后,我认为排他性的法律实证主义不能以概念为基础进行辩护。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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