Conclusions

Abstract

Legal doctrine faces philosophical criticism. It was pointed out in the foregoing chapters how one can reply to these objections.

• Juristic theories have important normative components and these are allegedly arbitrary. But normative statements are rationally justifiable.

• 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.

• Legal doctrine is criticized for its indeterminacy. The answer to this objection is “defeasibility, not indeterminacy.”

• 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.

• 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.