In our everyday lives we struggle with the notions of why we do what we do and the need to assign values to our actions. Somehow, it seems possible through experience and life to gain knowledge and understanding of such matters. Yet once we start delving deeper into the concepts that underwrite these domains of thought and actions, we face a philosophical disappointment. In contrast to the world of facts, values and morality seem insecure, uncomfortably situated, easily influenced by illusion or ideology. How can we apply this same objectivity and accuracy to the spheres of value and morality? In the essays included in this collection, Peter Railton shows how a fairly sober, naturalistically informed view of the world might nonetheless incorporate objective values and moral knowledge. This book will be of interest to professionals and students working in philosophy and ethics.

In contrast to facts, values and morality seem insecure, influenced by illusion or ideology. How can we apply this same objectivity and accuracy to values and morality? In this collection, Peter Railton shows how a fairly sober, naturalistically informed view of the world might incorporate objective values and moral knowledge.

This is Habermas's long awaited work on law, democracy and the modern constitutional state in which he develops his own account of the nature of law and democracy.

Facts and Norms in Law: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Legal Method presents an innovative collection of essays on the relationship between descriptive and normative elements in legal inquiry and legal practice. What role does empirical data play in law? New insights in philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities have forced the relationship between facts and norms on to the agenda, especially for legal scholars doing interdisciplinary work. This timely volume carefully combines critical perspectives from a range of different disciplinary traditions and theoretical positions.

This volume provides an overview of the most recent developments in empirical investigations of morality and assesses their impact and importance for ethical thinking. It involves contributions of scholars both from philosophy, theology and empirical sciences with firm standings in their own disciplines, but an inclination to step across borders—in particular the one between the world of facts and the world of norms. Human morality is complex, and probably even messy—and this clean distinction becomes blurred whenever one looks more closely at the various components that enable and influence our moral actions and ethical orientations. In that way, morality may indeed be located between facts and norms—and an empirically informed ethics that is less concerned with analytical purity but immerses into this moral complexity may be an important step to make the contributions of ethics to this world more valuable and relevant. ​

This book explores the interrelation of facts and norms. How does law originate in the first place? What lies at the roots of this phenomenon? How is it preserved? And how does it come to an end? Questions like these led Georg Jellinek to speak of the “normative force of the factual” in the early 20th century, emphasizing the human tendency to infer rules from recurring events, and to perceive a certain practice not only as a fact but as a norm; a norm which not only allows us to distinguish regularity from irregularity, but at the same time, to treat deviances as transgressions. Today, Jellinek’s concept still provides astonishing insights on the dichotomy of “is” and “ought to be”, the emergence of the normative, the efficacy and the defeasibility of (legal) norms, and the distinct character of what legal theorists refer to as “normativity”. It leads us back to early legal history, it connects anthropology and legal theory, and it demonstrates the interdependence of law and the social sciences. In short: it invites us to fundamentally reassess the interrelation of facts and norms from various perspectives. The contributing authors to this volume have accepted that invitation.

Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.