Video + Podcast: Robert Goodin presents "An Epistemic Case for Legal Moralism"

On January 16, Robert E. Goodin, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and of Social & Political Theory in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University, presented the 2007-2008 John Dewey Lecture on Jurisprudence. Entitled "An Epistemic Case for Legal Moralism," the talk was introduced by Cass Sunstein and addressed the following issues:

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, or so we are told. But why on earth not? The statute books run to hundreds of volumes. How can an ordinary citizen know what all is in them? The best way might be for law (at least in its wide-scope duty-conferring aspects) to track broad moral principles that ordinary citizens can know and apply for themselves. In contrast to more high-minded and deeply principled arguments, this epistemic argument for legal moralism is purely pragmatic – but importantly so. For law to do what law is supposed to do, which is to be action-guiding, people need to be able to intuit without detailed investigation what the law is for most common and most important cases of their conduct, and to intuit when their intuitions are likely to be unreliable and hence that they need to investigate further what the law actually is.

If you couldn't make it to the lecture (or would like to relive the experience), we've embedded a video below. If you'd like to download a Quicktime version of the video, you may do so here; or if you would just like the audio, it is available here.

Comments

[Kimball Corson]

I didn't have the patience or bandwidth to download the video (I am in Nicaragua), but I did want to react to the premise. The world is too complicated -- in fact, to say nothing of how we have made it -- solely to let our internal moral lights quide us in our convoluted affairs. Too, one man's moral compass may not be another's. Or worse, one's moral compass may not give him or her a reading, that is, have anything to say on point. Finally, the complexity of the law is one reason we have lawyer's: to give us informed advise on how we should proceed. We no longer live in homogeneous communities of mud huts and chrush grains for a living.

[Kimball Corson]

advice, that is.