Customary International Law: A Moral Judgment-Based Account

A State Preferences Account of Customary International Law Adjudication

The standard account today of customary international law (CIL) is that it arises from the widespread and consistent practice of states followed out of a sense of legal obligation. Although commonly recited, this account is plagued by evidentiary, normative, and conceptual difficulties, and it has been subjected to increasing criticism in recent years. This paper posits a different account of C...

Historical differentiation, moral judgment and the modern criminal law

responsibility to their historical development. Starting from George Fletcher’s account of three historical patterns of liability (Fletcher, 1978), Lacey develops a more complex differentiation, and at the same time foregrounds the historical conditions for the emergence of different conceptions of responsibility. In thinking about these, Lacey’s focus is on the relationship between capacity an...

The Formation of Customary Law

The development of intent-based moral judgment.

Between the ages of 4 and 8 children increasingly make moral judgments on the basis of an actor's intent, as opposed to the outcome that the actor brings about. Does this reflect a reorganization of concepts in the moral domain, or simply the development of capacities outside the moral domain such as theory of mind and executive function? Motivated by the past evidence that adults rely partiall...

Maldynia as a moral judgment?

Lippe rejected out of hand the idea advanced by Morris [5] that pain was a pluralistic concept. Rather, he asserted “the biomedical basis of maldynia.” In Lippe’s medicocentric view of pain, “maldynia” was neither a symptom nor a syndrome but an “illness with endogenous and exogenous components.” Thus defined, “eudynia” becomes a teleologically beneficial mechanism, whereas “maldynia” is “usele...