Joseph William Singer

Should Lawyers Care About Philosophy

Philosophy and justice have always had a rocky relationship. Socrates, remember, was put to death for teaching young people to question received wisdom on matters of public importance. 2 Yet his pupil Plato dared to maintain that philosophers possessed ways of thinking that could help answer our most puzzling questions about the nature of both truth and justice. This is our paradox: Sometimes our culture holds philosophy to be essential to define and support just social institutions, and sometimes philosophy appears either to undermine those institutions or to be irrelevant to them. Philosophers and legal theorists recently have been embroiled in a new debate about the relationships between philosophy and justice. This debate encompasses two issues. The first is the contest between objectivism and pragmatism. Objectivists believe that there are right answers to our most fundamental questions about truth and justice, and that we can