Archive of Events

Archive of Events

Host: MPI-CSL in cooperation with the Department of Political Science and Philosophy of Law at the University of Freiburg
The rule of law, once widely embraced and emulated, now faces serious threats to its viability. To get our bearings we must return to first principles. Law’s Rule: The Nature, Value, and Viability of the Rule of Law articulates and defends a coherent, compre­hen­sive, and compelling conception of the rule of law and defends it against serious challenges to its intelligibility, relevance, and normative force. In this lecture, Postema will sketch the basic outlines of this conception and the values it serves. The rule of law’s ambition, he will argue, is to provide protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of power using the distinctive tools of the law. Law provides a bulwark of protection, a bridle on the powerful, and a bond constituting and holding together the polity and giving public expression to an ideal mode of association. Two principles immediately follow from this core: sovereignty of law, demanding that those who exercise ruling power govern with law and that law governs them, and equality in the eyes of the law, demanding that law’s protection extend to all who are bound by it. Animating law’s rule, the ethos of fidelity commits all members of the political community to take responsibility for holding each other accountable under the law. The moral foundation of this demanding ideal lies in a commitment to common membership of each person in this community, recognizing their freedom, dignity, and status as peers. The lecture will consider the relationship between democracy, human rights, and the rule of law and will conclude with thoughts on some of the most serious threats to the viability of law’s rule. [more]
One central element of Joseph Raz’s writings about the nature of law is the assertion that law claims moral authority. The present work critically examines Raz’s claim, and uses that topic as a starting point to explore basic questions about the nature of legal obligation. An important part of that exploration will be an evaluation of the possibility of thinking of legal normativity as sui generis, rather than a type of normativity that needs to be reduced to or translated into some other factual or normative terms. [more]
A now-familiar thought (associated with the idea of “strong AI”) that in the not-too-distant future, AI may come to far surpass humans’ general cognitive capacities. Some famously worry that such AI pose an existential risk to humans, either due to indifference to human aims or a hostility to humans. This paper focuses on a different cluster of questions: a series of questions in the foundations of ethics raised by the possibility that we ask AI to engage in evaluative reasoning (e.g., about what is good and bad, right and wrong, etc.). There is a natural epistemic motive for asking strong AI to engage in evaluative reasoning: one might hope that strong AI could help us to make progress in addressing persistent evaluative controversies. However, suppose that strong AIs converge on evaluative conclusions that we are independently inclined to oppose. For example, AI might come to anti-anthropocentric evaluative conclusions (two examples: maybe they really prioritize certain cognitive capacities in their evaluations, treating us the way we treat mosquitos; or maybe they don’t, treating the interests of insects as on a par with that of highly rational beings). Alternatively, AI might come to radically consequentialist conclusions, that portray the evaluative significance of, e.g., our relations to our projects and loved ones as easily swamped. We take such dissatisfaction with (by hypothesis) epistemically highly credible evaluative conclusions to raise important questions about our attitudes towards the evaluative, even if we assume a strong sort of realism about evaluative thought and talk. It is familiar for metaethical antirealists to ask the question “why care about evaluative properties?” on the supposition that realism is true. And they often argue that this is a reason to reject realism. However, we think that the sorts of possibility we are canvassing instead makes salient two other ways of thinking about alienation from evaluative standards. First, it could push us to a conceptual ethics conclusion that we ought to adopt other (perhaps: more anthropocentric) evaluative concepts. Second, it might instead push us toward a deep alienation from the evaluative: that is, we might simply embrace that the our existing evaluative concepts capture what really and truly matters, and find that we simply don’t want our lives or world to be structured by what really and truly matters, if it involves sufficient sacrifice of what we care about. In light of these issues, we then reflect on how to best think about what “the” alignment problem in AI really is, suggesting that there are in fact multiple different “alignment” problems that are worth wrestling with, and that it is a difficult evaluative question which one to prioritize in thinking about AI ethics, and why. [more]

About the Nature and Value of Conceptual Legal Scholarship

Freiburg Lectures on Staatswissenschaft and Philosophy of Law
The lecture pursues two goals. First, Christian Bumke aims to compare how German legal doctrine and a pluralistic approach, known as the “New Private Law Theory” in the USA, can be used to think about and work with the law. Bumke will argue that, while there are considerable differences between the two, they can be understood as two variants of the same general approach towards legal scholarship, which he calls “conceptual legal scholarship”. His second goal consists in developing a reflection on methodol­ogy. For this purpose, he examines the differences within con­cep­tual legal scholarship. He wishes to show that very different academic activities are pursued both within legal doctrine and New Private Law scholarship. Bumke will make a distinction between two different types of conceptual legal scholarship. On the one hand, there are approaches that aim to explain a certain legal phenomenon; on the other hand, one finds approaches that aim to understand the law’s normative content. He will argue that differentiating between the two perspectives is important because they respond to different expectations and have to conform to different standards. [more]
In a lead­ing rul­ing on the stand­ard of proof, the Fed­er­al Court of Justice stated in 1970 that judges must be con­vinced to a “de­gree of cer­tainty” that need not quite be “bey­ond all reas­on­able doubt” but should go bey­ond a mere “prob­ab­il­ity bor­der­ing on cer­tain­ty.” The former is not re­quired by the law of evid­ence; the lat­ter is not suf­fi­cient (Rul­ing of the Fed­er­al Court of Justice in Civil Cases [BGHZ] 53, 245 ff.). From an epi­stem­o­lo­gic­al point of view, cla­ri­fic­a­tion is needed as to wheth­er a doxast­ic ap­proach fits in­to this nar­row con­struct. The BGH rul­ing refers to “con­vic­tion”, the “truth of an as­ser­tion”, and the re­quired “de­gree of cer­tainty”, but it does not ad­dress the con­cept of know­ledge, in which these ele­ments con­verge and are re­lated to each oth­er. In epi­stem­o­logy, it is dis­puted wheth­er or not hu­man fal­lib­il­ity, which is ir­re­voc­able, can be re­con­ciled with the as­sump­tion that hu­mans are cap­able of ac­quir­ing know­ledge. The lec­ture out­lines the ten­ets of a fal­lib­il­ist­ic concept of know­ledge and com­pares the chal­lenge of de­term­in­ing a suf­fi­cient level for the stand­ard of evid­ence to the epi­stem­o­lo­gic­al chal­lenge of re­con­cil­ing “to err is hu­man” with the claim to know­ledge. [more]
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