Oldal 73 [73]
INTENT TO DO RIGHT?
consistent with the fact that people who use the rules setting out these criteria
may make mistakes about which criteria are set by the rules”,*' as the “correct
criteria are those that people who think they understand the concept or term
generally share”.”
A reservation is due. I do not suggest that law or morality could be reduced to
an emanation of a totalitarian ideology, but the argument here does not require
it. This issue could become relevant if one were to argue whether what a Taliban
executioner or Nazi official consider as the ground for their acts is an acceptable
conception of law, or whether they consider such grounds as law using a generally
acceptable criteria for law. Suffice it to propose, in words of Arendt, that “ideological
thinking [that] becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our
five senses, and [that] insists on a “truer” reality concealed behind all perceptible
things"? can provide what is required for a parochial concept of law and right.
Following Raz**, I will refer to a perpetrator’s reinterpretation of grounds for
his or her actions as to a parochial understanding of law and argue that such
an interpretation is typically among primary reasons for perpetration of crimes
against humanity. Such interpretation is a rationalization in the sense of what
Davidson calls a reason for action:
“Whenever someone does something for a reason, therefore, he can be characterized as
(a) having some sort of pro attitude toward actions of a certain kind, and (b) believing
(or knowing, perceiving, noticing, remembering) that his action is of that kind.”
Such pro-attitude is directed towards “some feature, consequence, or aspect of
the action the agent wanted, desired, prized, held dear, thought dutiful, beneficial,
obligatory, or agreeable”.* If one were to use such rationalization as the meaning
for the word intention, then it can be said that enforcing or following a parochial
understanding of law is a part of shared ‘prior’ intention that is characteristic of
crimes against humanity.
3 Raz, Two Views of the Nature of the Theory of Law, 265.
3 Raz, Two Views of the Nature of the Theory of Law, 263.
% Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, NY, Harcourt Brace and
Company, 1973, 470-471.
34 Joseph Raz, Can There Bea Theory of Law?, in Martin Golding — William Edmundson (eds.)
Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2004
(2007), https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1498.
35 Donald Davidson, Actions, Reasons and Causes The Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963), 685.
+ 71°