How the Existent and the Deontic Meet

Abstract

The English empiricist philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) formulated the logical problem of the interaction of essence and deontic: moral imperatives, norms, laws, values, goals, policies, etc. are not derived from facts. The existence quantor does not apply to statements with ‘should’, ‘must’. Similarly, artificial intelligence can operate with temporal, epistemic, and even aletic modalities, but cannot analyze deontic and axiological operators, etc. Hume’s guillotine forces a distinction between the normative and the descriptive and the deductive. Law is the most normative and precise human science, where the present and the ideal are correlated. The desire to define its essence gives rise to fundamental questions about its location. Is it worthwhile to equate norm and being? Is it possible to derive law from social rationing? Can we see it in the psychological need for order and stability, in the subjective experience of duty? How can we bring together the being and the proper in the contradictory category of ‘law’, which means both the objective and the present, and, on the other hand, the valuable and the concrete. The social avatar of the dilemma of the ontic and the deontic is the gap between normative and sociological jurisprudence. The methodological purity of normativism collides with a fluid social reality. Special-legal means and procedures can create a police regime, but they cannot create a system of social justice. Law from the point of view of the proper is the recognition of the dependence of the legal on the social, the political, the economic. Without the proper, however, law loses its instrumentalism. Therefore, the state is like a mangrove biome, uniting heterogeneous environments of the essential and the proper. This article develops models of legal metatheory, or such a descriptor of law, which would explain the forms of the union of the existent and the deontic.