A Postmodern Defence of Universal Liberal Legal Norms
44 Pages Posted: 12 Oct 2012
Date Written: 2010
Abstract
The liberal ideal of the rule of law is concerned with the public nature of law, where “public” refers to a set of concerns that are taken to mark out the exercise of legal authority as distinct from, and regulative of, political power. This idea has come under strain in the face of various strands of “norm anxiety” nurtured in a political context of pluralism and an intellectual climate suspicious of claims of universal values. Heidegger provides one of the most sustained and sophisticated philosophical versions of this suspicion of universal values with his account of the social embeddedness of the self and his argument from this idea of the self to the ultimate contingency and groundlessness of any claims of normativity. This paper argues that Levinas’ response to Heidegger rescues a sense of the human that is not conditioned by cultural context and which can provide a basis for affirming universal values while not requiring that we throw away all insights into the deeply social and contextual nature of meaning. If there is a significance to the human beyond the particular context in which we find ourselves embedded and which can justify the endorsement of liberal norms, the expression of this remains essentially culturally conditioned and requires ongoing debate and revision. This, I will argue, leads to a view of legal norms as inseparable from the community practice of reasoning about these norms.
Keywords: Levinas, liberal norms, rule of law, legal reasoning, pluralism
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