October 18, 2011
What makes law legitimate? How does our sense of justice predetermine our attitudes toward rules and policies? Should we disobey unjust laws?
Participants of the October 18th seminar attempted to answer these and related questions, starting from their intuition of what is just and unjust and how these feelings predetermine the legitimacy of laws and political orders which bind us. For the mostly young audience of this session the questions initially raised rather positivist or realpolitik implications, associating the discourse of just and unjust with political manipulation rather than normative guidelines for organizing society. Acknowledging the fact that the question of (dis)obeying laws indeed bears upon our fundamental moral attitudes and that these attitudes significantly predetermine the social construction of our society evolved gradually as the discussion entered the normative structure of the inquiry. Toward the end, the rights discourse came to dominate the discussion and the debate came to concentrate on the prevalent social patterns and moral conventions upon which our society’s collective attitude toward the legitimacy of laws is founded. This conclusion offered a symbolic ending, as it closed the discussion on law and legitimacy by opening the floor for our next topic which is designed to further survey our informal value system and compare and contrast it with the formal human rights framework as provided by the Armenian Constitution.
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