Abstract
Legal doctrine faces philosophical criticism. It was pointed out in the foregoing chapters how one can reply to these objections.
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Juristic theories have important normative components and these are allegedly arbitrary. But normative statements are rationally justifiable.
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Legal doctrine allegedly refers to ontologically obscure entities. But legal doctrine can work without complex ontological assumptions. Moreover, a complex ontology admitting of conventional and moral objects is possible.
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Legal doctrine is criticized for its indeterminacy. The answer to this objection is “defeasibility, not indeterminacy.”
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Legal doctrine faces the objection that it wrongly presumes a common moral core in a pluralist society. But a core of this kind does actually exist and should not be ignored.
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Legal doctrine faces the objection that it is not universal, but territorially local and hence unscientific. But this locality has been exaggerated. There are considerably global and long-lived components of legal doctrine. Moreover, a precise normative statement cannot be truly universal, because all morality is society-centred.
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(2005). Conclusions. In: Roversi, C. (eds) A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3505-5_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3505-5_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-3387-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-3505-0
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