213 research outputs found
Law, normativity and the model of norms
There exists a widespread consensus amongst contemporary jurisprudents, positivists and non-positivists alike, that the meaning of ‘obligation’ should not radically shift from law to morality, or any of the other domains of practical reason. Yet there is limited effort in contemporary discussions of legal obligation to engage with the metaphysics of normativity with an eye to a well-founded account of those elements that deliver its non-conditional character.
On a recent occasion I discussed the shortcomings of a prominent positivist account of legal obligation, that of Jules Coleman. In this chapter I turn to a prominent non-positivist account, the model of principle, and argue that, even though it identifies key elements or conditions of normativity simpliciter, it stops short of delivering a conclusive account of unconditional legal obligation, an account that would place legal obligation in the same continuum with all other types of obligation. Taking up from where the model of principle halts, I propose a complementary—if more fundamental—account of normativity simpliciter, which I dub the model of norms. I make a case for it, by looking into universal conditions of normativity and, in conclusion, offer some more specific remarks about the advantages of the model of norms over other competing models.
Part 2 looks into the account of legal obligation tendered by the model of principle. According to it, law is an instance of action-directing action or action that purports to get other agents to comply with the ends it sets out to attain. The idea here is that the very logic of action-direction draws moral reasons—principles—into the picture of legal obligation, as the one item that can explain how and whether the facts of a social practice, which purports to direct action, come to acquire the status of reasons for action for the subjects of law. Subsequently, this model is contrasted with an alternative model of obligation that takes facts of authority to constitute reasons of action in virtue solely of their structure. In conclusion it is argued that, in contrast to the second model, the model of principle manages to capture what is distinctive about action-directing action in the domain of law—that is, the special normative significance of the possibility to coerce others under a scheme of public institutions.
Part 3 opens by pointing to a more widespread worry that needs to be addressed before the model of principle can be deemed fit for the role it is employed—the worry relates to the ability of principles to constitute genuine reasons for action. In particular, the enquiry investigates the nature of principles and their ability to avoid certain flaws that might pertain to reasons for action in general. In taking up this line of enquiry the paper looks into the more general debate on normativity with a view to specifying requirements that anything which purports to be a reason ought to meet. I employ a rationalist analysis of normativity, which brings the idea that intentional thought is normative to bear on the analysis of the meaning of normative terms, such as ‘ought’, ‘obligation’, ‘duty’. In conclusion, I argue that the content of normativity consists in normative facts—ie norms—which purport to model the content of ideal—or counterfactual—states of the will. Such norms give exhaustively the content of normativity.
In light of the above, part 4 advances a two-layered model of norms, with the higher level being populated by norms simpliciter, and the lower by norms in a domain. When considered jointly the two layers ground the possibility of non-conditional obligation without evoking moral realism and the concomitant suspicion of scepticism. On the face of it some key advantages of the model of norms are discussed over the two other models of legal obligation, that of principle and that of authority. On the one hand norms resist the ‘talking past each other objection’ which is commonly levelled against principles. On the other, norms are much better suited to account for the moral limits of action-directing action than either principles or facts of authority, for they illustrate cogently that the grounds of any reason for action already include a concern for others’ autonomy
Harvesting Multiple Views for Marker-less 3D Human Pose Annotations
Recent advances with Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) have shifted the
bottleneck for many computer vision tasks to annotated data collection. In this
paper, we present a geometry-driven approach to automatically collect
annotations for human pose prediction tasks. Starting from a generic ConvNet
for 2D human pose, and assuming a multi-view setup, we describe an automatic
way to collect accurate 3D human pose annotations. We capitalize on constraints
offered by the 3D geometry of the camera setup and the 3D structure of the
human body to probabilistically combine per view 2D ConvNet predictions into a
globally optimal 3D pose. This 3D pose is used as the basis for harvesting
annotations. The benefit of the annotations produced automatically with our
approach is demonstrated in two challenging settings: (i) fine-tuning a generic
ConvNet-based 2D pose predictor to capture the discriminative aspects of a
subject's appearance (i.e.,"personalization"), and (ii) training a ConvNet from
scratch for single view 3D human pose prediction without leveraging 3D pose
groundtruth. The proposed multi-view pose estimator achieves state-of-the-art
results on standard benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method
in exploiting the available multi-view information.Comment: CVPR 2017 Camera Read
Law's ontology and practical reason
The thesis is an attempt to reconcile law's dual nature, its factual dimension (its facticity)
and its normative/evaluative dimension (its normativity), in a non-reductive manner. The
tension between those two dimensions appears particularly acute when we try to discern
some object of reference for our normative talk/discourse. Then the possibility of absence of
such objects poses a high threat to the meaningfulness of the enterprise of law tout court.
Faced with this danger lawyers usually end up reducing legal referents to physical, nonnormative
entities. Palpable for our senses as those entities may be, they do not seem to
eliminate the threat of meaninglessness posed to the legal enterprise, as they end up
eliminating law's normativity.
In contrast I argue that legal and broader practical norms can be reconstructed as
abstract objects that are available to knowledge. The method employed, relies predominantly
on a semantic explication of the 'objecthood' of norms along the lines of a neo-Fregean
theory of mental content. Further, I employ an analysis of the meaning of legal expressions
in order to show that a semantic account of legal 'objecthood' will be demarcated by the
pragmatic-normative requirements that support the relevant practices in which legal meaning
is generated (as is specified by some version of Wittgenstein's 'meaning as use' theory of
meaning). I proceed to argue that those pragmatic requirements include some transcendental
pragmatic norms which specify an ultimate practical or moral point of view against the
background of which practical meaning is possible. Later, this point of view is specified as a
Super-norm or Principle of Autonomy. This norm bestows an evaluative element upon the
meaning of all practical expressions/sentences and, via the semantic explication of ontology,
into the normative objects (rules, properties and so on) that correspond to them.
Finally, it is claimed that legal norms are a species of practical norms, to the extent
that both fall under the same criteria of validity that are specified by the point of view of the
Norm ofAutonomy
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