Although the “crisis” of human rights discourse has many aspects, it is hard not to get the impression that the most important of them is the incorrect understanding of the philosophical foundations of these rights. The paper presents various hypotheses regarding the nature of this error. The first hypothesis suggests that this crisis simply stems from philosophical indifference to the problem of philosophically grounding human rights – treating them, in a sense, in isolation from other ethical ideas. The second identifies the source of the crisis in the misguided attempt to ground human rights in ethical relativism. The third, which is somewhat connected to the second, suggests that the crisis arises from the attempt to ground human rights in the idea of radical autonomy, which results in placing freedom above all other values; this attempt seems to be, to some extent, inspired by modern gnosticism, which rejects nature as normative. The paper also discusses various strategies for resolving this crisis.

W rozdziale IX („Prawo”) książki Wiedza a świat społeczny (1999) Alvin I. Goldman prowadzi wnikliwe rozważania nad naturą procesu sądowego, broniąc dwóch głównych tez. Zgodnie z pierwszą z nich prawda (trafność co do faktów orzeczeń sądowych) jest (i powinna być) wartością główną w procesie sądowym, zaś zgodnie Streszczenia 307 z drugą proces kontradyktoryjny (charakterystyczny dla systemu common law) jest mniej skutecznym mechanizmem ustalania stanu faktycznego (odkrywania prawdy) niż proces quasi-inkwizycyjny (charakterystyczny dla systemu kontynentalnego). W artykule obie tezy zostają skonfrontowane z dorobkiem nurtu Law & Economics w zakresie znaczenia prawdy w procesie sądowym. Broniony jest też pogląd, że o ile pierwsza teza Goldmana jest, generalnie rzecz biorąc, przekonująca, choć wymaga pewnych uściśleń nieco osłabiających jej wydźwięk, o tyle druga wzbudza poważne wątpliwości.

Pojęcie wolności nieprzerwanie powraca w filozoficznych debatach – właśnie dlatego, że dotyka najgłębszych warstw ludzkiego doświadczenia. Choć niezwykle nośne i atrakcyjne, jest zarazem wieloznaczne i doczekało się licznych historycznych artykulacji. Autorzy książki wyróżniają trzy zasadnicze typy wolności: wolność wewnętrzną (pozytywną) – rozumianą jako panowanie nad sobą, wolność zewnętrzną (negatywną) – oznaczającą brak zewnętrznych ograniczeń dla realizacji pragnień człowieka, oraz wolność polityczną – traktowaną jako prawo do uczestniczenia w życiu wspólnoty politycznej. Analizują je w kontekście filozoficznym i historycznym oraz w odniesieniu do barier, które utrudniają ich pełne urzeczywistnienie w warunkach współczesności. Trzy oblicza wolności nie muszą – i nie powinny – być ze sobą w konflikcie. Gdy nie zostają jednostronnie zabsolutyzowane, mogą tworzyć spójną strukturę pełnej wolności. Źródłem napięć między nimi nie jest bowiem ich wewnętrzna sprzeczność, lecz brak otwartości na wartość, jaką wyraża określony aspekt wolności.

This article addresses a critique of contemporary egalitarianism that, while certainly present, has not been prominent in the relevant literature on equality. Rather than examining internal flaws in the concept of equality itself, it asks whether the dominant form of egalitarianism in current political discourse – particularly within liberal and left-liberal agendas – has become selectively applied in ways that undermine its foundational aims. Specifically, in the paper the claim is made that this contemporary form of egalitarianism: (a) foregrounds peripheral issues over core egalitarian concerns; (b) does so at the expense of addressing the condition of the worst-off; and (c) can be best understood through the lens of ‘easy morality’ – a normative posture marked by minimal personal cost, misaligned ethical priorities (ordo amoris), and broad social approval that masks its limitations. It argues that central egalitarian concerns – such as wealth concentration, global poverty, and middle-class decline – have been sidelined in favour of less demanding but more culturally salient causes. Finally, the paper proposes several hypotheses regarding the socio-cultural and political factors contributing to this shift.

It is commonly surmised that restrictions limit freedom. Yet, the sense of freedom is a psychological experience only partially determined by objective restrictions. Deriving from the psychology of goals, we propose that people's sense of freedom depends on the goals they focus on, and their attainability. Across four preregistered studies, we investigated the impact of goal focus on participants' sense of freedom. In Studies 1-3, participants indicated the goals they could pursue despite the pandemic restrictions (commitment condition), the goals they needed to relinquish due to the restrictions (sacrifice condition), or no goals whatsoever (control condition). In Study 4, we manipulated goal focus by priming participants with the goal of socializing (which was hindered during the pandemic) and the goal of spending time alone (which was facilitated during the pandemic). Consistently across four studies, we found that participants experienced a significantly higher sense of freedom when they focused on enabled versus disabled goals. Moreover, in Studies 2 and 3, we observed that a greater sense of freedom was associated with better coping during the pandemic, reduced resistance to imposed constraints (reduced reactance), and a more positive evaluation of the imposed restrictions. These findings indicate that focusing on attainable goals instills a sense of freedom and contributes to constructive coping under objective constraints.

How can evolutionary theory be used in the analysis of moral and legal progress? Some thinkers in the past (the so-called Social Darwinists) erroneously believed that evolutionary theory can provide a moral criterion of the evaluation of the course human history and also justify the descriptive claim that human history - social evolution - as part of 'cosmic evolution' has proceeded in the direction determined by this criterion. This way of invoking evolutionary theory in the context of the analysis of moral and legal progress is, fortunately, not the only one that is possible. I would like to propose a different way, which is 'indirect', as it implies that the very process of evolution does not provide any criterion of the evaluation of human history nor does it possess any direction. The way is based on evolutionary insights into human 'moral nature'. It consists, in the first step, in reconstructing 'evolutionary ethics', that is: a set of moral rules built upon, or expressive of, our predispositions shaped by natural selection. Since, as I will argue, these 'natural' moral rules are highly imperfect, they may constitute, so to say, a negative criterion of evaluation. But this criterion is insufficient because one can depart from evolutionary ethics also in the direction of even more considerable moral imperfection. Thus, a positive criterion is necessary (this is the second step): I shall call this criterion 'genuine ethics', that is: a set of moral rules which impose much stronger requirements of impartiality than evolutionary ethics. I will argue that human history can be interpreted as a (complex and arduous) process of overcoming evolutionary ethics (which can be called our 'default moral system') and approaching genuine ethics.

The rules of Polish law which formulate the conditions of permissibility of medical experiment, and thus determine its limits, can be interpreted in many different ways, especially in so far as they concern the required balance of potential costs and benefits of a planned experiment. However, in legal literature commenting on these rules one can hardly find a systematic and precise (to the degree which is possible in this area) account of these interpretations in the language of rational choice theory – the theory which is particularly helpful in such analysis due to its sophisticated conceptual apparatus for examining various configurations of costs and benefits. The present article is aimed to fill in this gap, providing this kind of account, and also attempting at an evaluation of the proposed interpretations.

A robust field of research has elucidated when and why people are willing to offer help in times of crisis. Yet helping behaviour does not always occur when needed, and the absence of helping during crisis is less well studied. By broadly defining a crisis as an extremely difficult, disruptive and dangerous situation, which may result in possible harm to individuals, groups and societies, this article reviews research focused on the following general question: What factors (psychological, sociological, economic and legal) prevent people from helping others in times of collective crisis? The present work (a) integrates the helping literature, (b) presents new theoretical and empirical perspectives on novel findings concerning failures to help during crises, and (c) suggests recommendations that will enable professionals involved in emergency management to support the public in developing their own capacity to manage and overcome crises. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

The chapter provides a survey of various uses which were made of (biological) evolutionary theory in the field of law, dividing them into the legitimate, the illegitimate and the controversial. It is argued in it that the legitimate (and fruitful) use consists in reconstructing an evolutionary view of human nature and tracing its implications for various legal or legal-philosophical problems; that the illegitimate use is connected with the current of thought known as Social Darwinism, which, roughly speaking, conferred normative meaning on the laws of biological evolution; and that the controversial (though promising) uses of evolutionary theory can be made in the context of metaethics, of the controversy between ius-naturalism and legal positivism, and of the justification of ecological ethics.

The chapter rests on the claim (made by various scholars, e.g., András Sajó) that a successful constitutional design is possible only if it is based on a plausible theory of the interactions between public sentiments and constitutions themselves. It is focused on the analysis of a specific class of constitutional sentiments (generated and/or refulated by constitutions), viz. anti-constitutional ones - those which lie at the core of populism, and is aimed at proposing some tentative answers to the question of how constitutions can regulate and channel by design such undesirable sentiments. The answers proposed in the chapter are inspired by various theories touching upon the interaction between law and emotions, i.a. by constraint theory, Petrażycki's psychological theory of law, or mechanism design theory.

It seems undeniable that there are certain kinds of wrongdoing which can hardly be described in terms of rights’ violations. Their wrongful character is so extreme that a different kind of moral language is indispensable to adequately capture their moral gravity. In this paper it is argued that such a language is provided by Simone Weil’s moral theory. The first part of the paper is an attempt at reconstructing this theory, highlighting Weil’s critique of the language of rights and analysing the ‘moral extremes’ that this theory embraces, viz. absolute goodness and absolute evil (which Weil calls ‘injustice’). In this part an attempt is also made at clarifying the normative relations between both ‘extremes’, which Weil did not discuss at greater length. The second part is a case study of a type of injustice, namely crimes committed against the indigenous peoples. In the last part a comparison is made between Weil’s and Hannah Arendt’s views on the legitimacy of using ‘absolutist’ moral language in the public discourse.

Kant proposed an apriorical account of the idea of law, according to which the law’s only legitimate goal is to guarantee for each citizen a possibly broad scope of external freedom compatible with the same scope of all other citizens. However, Kant did not make it entirely clear how this idea is to be justified. This paper presents two ways of justification, drawing on Kant’s view of the human nature. The first one appeals to the apriorical components of this view (rationality, freedom, equality, and dignity), and the second one is based on its empirical components (the ambivalent account of human predispositions).

The controversy over “Is” and “Ought” distinction appears in legal philosophy in two different contexts: of the discussion about the nature of legal reasoning and of the discussion about the sources of legal normativity (of “legal Ought”). In the former context, the controversy concerns the existence of the so-called logic of norms; in the latter it concerns the nature of “legal Ought,” viz., its relationships to “moral Ought” and to “Is” (social facts). At first glance these two discussions may seem unrelated to each other, but, as will be shown in Conclusions, there are interesting connections between them. At the outset, prior to presenting these discussions and connections, one important observation needs to be made. The legal philosophers participating in these discussions are rarely interested in the problem of deriving “Ought” from “Is.” They, in general, deem this task unfeasible and thereby, so to speak, respect Hume’s famous ban called by Max Black (1964) “Hume’s guillotine.” It must be admitted, though, that there have appeared occasional discussions of this problem in legal philosophy (e.g., von Wright 1985), but their conclusions were usually that the purported derivations of “Ought” from “Is,” proposed, e.g., by John Searle (1964) or Max Black (1964), are not convincing. They were regarded as unconvincing on three different grounds: that the “Ought” these derivations generate is tacitly included in the premises; or is a “technical Ought” (which specifies what ought to be done if a given norm “endowed” with “normative Ought” is to be satisfied); or is a hypothetical imperative in Kant’s sense (which makes the duty –“Ought” – conditional on the agent’s willingness to achieve a certain goal). However, it bears repeating that the problem the legal philosophers most frequently tackle in the context of the discussion about the existence of the logic of norms is not whether “Ought” can be derived from “Is,” i.e., whether “Oughtsentences” can function as conclusions in inferences with descriptive premises. The problem they usually tackle is, firstly, whether normative logical inferences, i.e., inferences in which “Ought-sentences” function as conclusions and premises, are possible and, secondly, whether “Ought-sentences” can, similarly to “Issentences,” be assigned truth values (the positive answer to the latter question does not, of course, infringe upon Hume’s ban: from the fact that norms can be true or false does not follow that the gap between “Is” and “Ought” can be bridged). In the context of the problem of the sources of legal normativity, the question they pose is how to justify the normativity of law (i.e., the fact that legal statements can be aptly

The title of this article alludes to the famous novel by Stefan Zweig Ungeduld des Herzens (translated into English as “Beware of Pity”). The novel illustrates the destructive role that pity plays in our private life, but, as will be argued in the article, the role of pity can be equally destructive in public life. The first part of the article has a conceptual character – the distinction is made therein between two types of pity: (1) as “the heart’s impatience (Ungeduld des Herzens)” to “rid itself as quickly as possible of the painful experience of being moved by another person’s suffering (Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity, p. 19)”; and (2) as a mixture of contempt towards the sufferer and increased sense of one’s own power. What these two types of pity have in common is that they are self-regarding, that is, not having as its ultimate aim the well-being of the suffering person, and in fact preserving distance to the sufferer. This feature distinguishes them from compassion – a truly other-regarding fellow-feeling with the sufferer. The second part of the article, inspired by Zweig’s novel, will trace the negative consequences of pity in our private lives. The third part will strive, first, to reconstruct Hannah Arendt’s argumentation (presented in her book On Revolution) for her critical evaluation of pity as a political emotion, and secondly, to develop it in some new directions (inter alia, drawing on the above distinction between two types of pity, which is absent in Arendt’s analysis). Finally, it will be argued that even though in private life empathy (broadly understood) does not have to take the form of pity (it often assumes the laudable form of compassion), it is almost bound to take the form of pity in political life. If this claim is true, it means that one needs to treat with much caution the oft-made postulates of increasing the role of ‘empathy’ in public life.

To what extent - if at all - acting in passion diminishes the agent's responsibility for his/her deed? Some new aspects of this classical problem have been discovered by experimental psychologists (Pizarro, Uhlmann, Salovey) whose research has revealed a puzzling asymmetry in assigning responsibility for morally bad and morally good actions, performed under the influence of emotions (people tend to regard the blameworthiness of an immoral act as being diminished by the fact that it was performed in passion, but do not regard passion as influencing the praiseworthiness of a moral act). The article discusses the puzzle's explanation proposed by the authors of the experiment (based on the concept of "metadesires") and offers an alternative explanation, drawing on the distinction between passio antecedens and passio consequens, proposed by Thomas Aquinas. The paper also provides some reflections on the normative aspects of the problem of acting under the influence of emotions.

Liberal democracy is often considered to be unstable, consisting of two markedly different ideals (i.e., liberalism and democracy) that remain in tension. Yet the thesis regarding the alleged instability of liberal democracy is itself ambiguous, for it may refer to two senses of instability: empirical or conceptual. After introducing this, in our view, important distinction (though overlooked in the relevant literature where both senses of ‘stability’ are usually mixed up) we argue that while liberal democracy is indeed empirically unstable, it is, contrary to the implicitly assumed dominant opinion, conceptually stable. In the first part of the paper, we introduce several arguments supporting the thesis about the conceptual stability of liberal democracy; the arguments appeal to the ideas of the (constitutional) precommitment, intrinsic equality, and liberty. In the second part, we provide arguments for the claim about the empirical instability of liberal democracy, identifying its main causes, viz. several anthropological-psychological propensities, in particular the weakness of the propensity for freedom, hierarchical proclivities, and inclinations to adopt extreme normative convictions.

The paper distinguishes two ways in which solipsism (in the ontological or epistemic sense) can be linked with ethics.The first one is connected with the question: What would ethical duties look like if solipsism in the ontological or epistemic sense were true?, whereas the second with the question:To what ethical phenomena may one legitimately refer the word "solipsism" in such a way that it would satisfy the following two conditions: it would retain some trace of its ontological sense and at the same time entail negative ethical evaluation?In response to the first question, some thought experiments are proposed in the paper.As for the second question, several different phenomena are distinguished that seem to satisfy both conditions, viz.radical/extreme narcissism, radical/extreme egoism (in Marquise de Sade's or Max Stirner's sense), and cognitively -based (egocentric) egoism.

It is often argued that evolutionary theory and feminism remain in tension, since the evolutionary view of human nature is hard to reconcile with the feminist view. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that this thesis is false. This goal is realized by reconstructing a certain anti-feminist evolutionary argument (whose descriptive conclusion is the “patriarchal” picture of male and female nature, and the normative conclusion is the claim that given the deep differences between men and women the feminist postulates cannot be achieved) and providing its critique. The argument is based on three premises: a theory of parental investment, the assumption of a relatively large (compared with other species) men’s parental investment in ancestral environments, and the uncertainty of paternity. Its (descriptive) conclusion is the claim that men are “by nature” much more polygamously disposed, much more desirous of power (over the opposite sex), and much more aggressive than women. The paper presents several objections to this argument. The first objection questions its internal coherence. The second one points at its counterintuitive (not supported by empirical facts) consequences. The third one criticizes one of the assumptions of the argument, i.e. the assumption about a relatively large (compared with other species) men’s parental investment in ancestral environments.