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The Intellectual Commitments of Modern Juridical Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2015
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To modern writers, the distinctive achievement of twentieth-century jurisprudence can be viewed as its emancipation from the narrow confines of English utilitarianism, and the subsequent development of perspectives rooted in the fundamental values of justice and rights. The central jurisprudential task of the new century is thus the exploration of a deeper, more elusive moral standpoint, the most profound intellectual commitments of which are yet to be fully digested and understood. My aim in this essay is to reveal something of the character of those commitments by considering the relationship of our present thinking about law and morality to its historical development.
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- Copyright © Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 2010
References
A version of this essay was given as my inaugural lecture at the University of Exeter in May 2010. I would like to thank those present for discussion and suggestions. I would also and especially like to thank Fiona Smith, Margaret Martin and Richard Bronaugh for their extremely valuable comments on earlier drafts.
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71. Adorno, Horkheimer and the French thinker Lacan stressed this similarity: see History and Illusion, supra note 36 at 83.
72. Ibid.
73. De Jure Naturae, supra note 16.
74. This is not to suggest, however, that the values imposed by the will are arbitrary; for it is a dogma of the Kantian philosophy and its intellectual descendants that the will is fully realized only in being rational.
75. I leave aside here any discussion of the extent to which motive or intention is relevant to, let alone ‘grounds’ morality.
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