RphZ Rechtsphilosophie

This paper focusses inequalities in the welfare state. Therefore, the equal distribution of an egalitarianism will be examined. The normative sources of the welfare state are not equality but the good life. Such an approach will be discussed...

That wrongdoing can be understood as scalar rather than bivalent, is a kind of truism in modern criminal law theory. But how exactly the strength and stringency of legal prohibitions and corresponding obligations can be conceptualized, is a...

The paper starts from the observation that laws are full of conditional norms or obligations, the defeasible character of which prevents representing them by the material implication of classical logic. Material implication almost never adequately...

My contribution starts with an analysis of the structure of normative argumentation, which is understood as the balancing of normative arguments that leads to normative judgements. Its crucial point is that normative arguments and normative...

Postmodernism has discredited thinking and arguing with dichotomies. Especially since the great dichotomies of object and subject, body and mind, being and ought are obsolete to it. Against this background, a critique of law and jurisprudence grew...

How logic can cope with the law, and vice versa, strongly depends on how one imagines the structure of legal reasoning. Of course, one can analyze relationships between (supposed) statements of legal code in the conditional, prescriptive form...

Distinguishing rules and principles presupposes a criterion as a means not only to identify rules and principles but also to underscore their differences. In this essay, the notion of defeasibility will be presented as such a criterion....

The „Great Reset“ is an initiative of the World Economic Forum WEF which „resets“ in that it seeks to reshape the global economy and society. The associated set of measures portrays an uncertain, risky, unsustainable and barely inclusive...

The legal and ethical justifiability of the measures taken to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has so far been discussed under the aspects of balancing goods and proportionality. The important distinction between negative and positive moral duties...

The question of the relationship between freedom and security is characteristic of the discourse in times of crisis. In the coronavirus pandemic, too, society is faced with the challenge of how a democratic order can overcome the security crisis...

The coronavirus pandemic as an exceptional social situation demands social-philosophical answers. On the basis of care and power as relationship concepts, the following essay discusses several aspects of German pandemic law and its potential for the...

The article deals with the ethical justification of distribution procedures in case of a shortage of life-saving resources, as they have been discussed since spring 2020 under the keyword ‘triage’. Considering individual human dignity and the...

When, within the framework of a highly controversial debate of the early 1990s in Germany on the right to asylum, Winfrid Brugger argued, a human right to asylum could not be based on sound reason, he referred to the supposed impossibility of an...

The restriction of freedom of movement within the German asylum procedure is legally controversial. My essay applies John Rawls’ Theory of Justice to this problem. This is appropriate because Rawls makes the principle of equal basic freedoms the...

Kant’s philosophy of law is predominantly received without reference to its author’s - seemingly less compatible - positions in the philosophy of history. The following article attempts to trace the internal dependence of Kant’s philosophy of...

In his late work Perpetual Peace. A philosophical sketch from 1795/96, Kant gives us some hints on the relation between migration and cosmopolitanism. In his “general law of hospitality”, which is not a law of guest, but guarantees a right of...

This article analyses nudging from the perspective of liberal democratic theory of law. On the level of constitutional law, nudging is criticised for being paternalistic. At second thought, many forms of nudging are in contrast not paternalistic,...

Law requires language. Within legal theory one is aware that language can be used as a vehicle to fill legal norms with the subjective preferences of the respective author when interpreting and generating law. However, the cognitive basics of legal...