Justice and Logic

The Role of Deductive Methods in the Reasoning of Justice

Zitiervorschlag: Hajime Yoshino, Justice and Logic, in: Jusletter IT 2

This paper aims to clarify the role of logical deductive methods in the reasoning of justice. Many traditional legal theories endeavored to present a deductive system of legal norms where concrete legal norms are deduced from abstract general norms or principles. We analyze these theories, for example in the natural law theory of Samuel Pufendorf, logically to clarify that they seem to be deductive at the first glance but are not deductive in the precise logical sense. We make it clear that they are based not only on the reasoning of deductive justification but also on the reasoning of legal creation or discovery. We clarify the reasoning of creation of norms as a combination of the generation of hypothetical norms and the examination of concrete norms. We demonstrate that the former reasoning is to be formalized as an inductive reasoning and the latter reasoning is to be formalized as the reasoning of falsification in the sense of Karl Popper. On the way to analyze theories of justice, this paper clarifies that the concept of justice is to be interpreted as the concept of truth in logic.

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