11 quotes
Without good-will, no man has any presumptive right, except the right or opportunity to change his will, so long as there is hope of it.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
Principle I : Legal rights are presumptive rights.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
Law deals not with actual individuals, but with individuals artificially defined.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
Principle II : The presumptions of the law are creative presumptions : they are aimed at conditions to be brought about, and only for that reason ignore conditions which exist.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
Principle III : Presumptive rights are the conditions under which individual powers normally develop.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
For those who have only to obey, law is what the sovereign commands. For the sovereign, in the throes of deciding what he ought to command, this view of law is singularly empty of light and leading.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
Nothing is more evident, I venture to think, as a result of two or three thousand years of social philosophizing, than that society must live and thrive by way of the native impulses of individual human beings.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
It is right, or absolute right, that an individual should develop the powers that are in him. He may be said to have a "natural right" to become what he is capable of becoming. This is his only natural right.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
The only thing that can set aside a law as wrong is a better law, or an idea of a better law. And the only thing that an give a law the quality of better or worse is the concrete result which it promotes or fails to promote.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
Wherever moral ambition exists, there right exists.
And moral ambition itself must be presumed present in subconsciousness, even when the conscious self seems to reject it, so long as society has resources for bringing it into action; in much the same way that the life-saver presumes life to exist in the drowned man until he has exhausted his resources for recovering respiration.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)
Pure community is a matter of no interest to any will; but a community which pursues a common good is of supreme interest to all wills; and what we have here said is that whatever the nature of that common good … it must contain the development of individual powers, as a prior condition for all other goods.
Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights (1926)