The Grudge Informant is a case that is easy to look back and pass judgement on since most can agree that the soldiers wife should be punished. H.L.A Hart agrees, but as a legal positivist, he understands that the wife did nothing illegal at the time and cannot be punished for following the law. So, Hart would suggest the only way to legally punish the wife would be to enact a retroactive law that would make conversations between husband and wife confidential therefore making the husbands criticisms of the third reich private and the wifes admission to the gestapo illegal. This demonstrates Hart’s commitment to legal positivism and his opposition to natural law theory because it would set in place a new law that has to be followed while maintaining the legitimacy of the law and …show more content…
The specific example that H.L.A. Hart uses frequently in defense of his legal positivist position is one of a poorly run monarchy that places their morality into laws. The thing about what they were is doing is that their sense of morality gave an unfair advantage to the monarchy and people of a higher socioeconomic class and degraded the lower class and peasants which would have made up a large part of the population. Inserting their morality into the situation only served to make things worse in a moral sense and also affected people in a very real way. This isn’t to say that natural law is all bad because it is not, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used natural law in a way that served to drastically increase morality in the America in the 1960’s by using it to defy the laws of the time to worked to integrate African-American individuals into society in a way that was non-violent. The problem with natural law though is that it can be very easily corrupted if put into the hands of the wrong people. Legal positivism doesn’t give the power to the judge in a situation to insert their morality into interpretations of the
On November 14, 1945, the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials began in Germany. They were to be the definitive judgement of the crimes against humanity by the Nazis. In the midst of the trial, it was determined that the SS, along with its associated organizations such as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD--the security and intelligence organization within the SS) and Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo—State Secret Police), was a criminal organization.1 The verdict placed on the SS was as follows:
It is insulting to the brave Germans who resisted the government to lump von Grone into their ranks. She supported the Nazi party and the values it espoused; she simply had a power squabble with a high-ranking religious official. Even if “opponents” opposed specific Nazi policies that affected their day-to-day lives, in the case of von Grone, opposition was often based on self-interest and convenience, not on moral and political aversion to the anti-Semitic, racist values of the state. The second example Koonz analyzes is more
Thane Rosenbaum, in his “Should Neo-Nazis Be Allowed Free Speech?” essay, used the Supreme courts justifying the right of a church group opposing gays serving in the military to picket the funeral of a dead marine with signs that read, “God Hates Fags” as well as neo-Nazis marching in a holocaust survivors’ town as an opportunity to oppose on justifying hate speeches with offensive intentions. Even though it was a strong topic, by missing an ethos appeal and stressing pathos appeal, Rosenbaum failed to make an effective and convincing argument. Rosenbaum did not share that his parents survived the holocaust, and that he is heavily involved in opposing the Nazi regime. He is a law professor in the U.S., and he was also visiting professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in Israel, where he has been a frequent speaker, including at the annual Yom HaShoah Lecture hosted jointly by the American Society for Yad Vashem and Cardozo 's Program in Holocaust & Human Rights Studies on “Remember How the Law Went Horribly Wrong”; the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials on "A Reappraisal and Their Legacy"; and as the Uri & Caroline Bauer Distinguished Lecturer on Rosenbaum 's book, “The Myth of Moral Justice."
Nole Ehrhardt Motifs: 1.Legalized Discrimination Hein ¾ 2.Community “Tell Them We Remember” “German-African children were killed by the Nazis because they were viewed as an inferior race,” says Susan Bachrach in Tell Them We Remember, page 12. To start off, the book is about the black, white and bloody facts about everything that happened during the Holocaust. Now, Susan used the motifs of Legalized discrimination and community to show the that “discrimination puts people into separated social communities.” FIrst, the motif of Legalized Discrimination is shown when it states that the Nazis passed a law that restricted all civilian jobs to “Aryans,” the “perfect race”(Susan Bachrach page 12) THis upholds the theme
The Holocaust is still a heavily reviewed subject and is debatably one of the worst if not the worst atrocity that has happened on this Planet up to date. To think that the Nazi’s were able to kill millions of people it has made us question what kind of people they were and if they were anything similar to us. It is hard to think of a perpetrator to be a normal human being. The Holocaust has made us question if the Nazi’s had any sense of moral sensibility when killing innocent and defenseless Jewish men and women. In the book Ordinary Men, Author Christopher Browning argues that these Nazi’s especially referring to the Reserve Police Battalion 101 were normal people who had instructions given by Hitler and their government to follow through with by devaluing all Jewish life.
The destinies of several nazi individuals all throughout the last of World War II are spread wherever the guide regarding what transpired. Many took a sign from their devoted pioneer, Adolf Hitler, and submitted suicide to evade catch and discipline. These war hoodlums could never need to confront their violations. Others fled the nation and went up against expected characters in an attempt to escape experts. While a large portion of the individuals who fled were caught, there is entirely a main 10 most needed rundown of Holocaust war lawbreakers today.
There is immense pressure to report anything the goes against the Socialist Party’s principles, no matter the person. For example, Thomas turns his father in for defending his Jewish colleagues thus insulting Hitler, and is essentially the cause of his death. However, Peter is asked to spy on his boss at the bookstore, but after finding incriminating items he keeps it to himself. These contrasting reactions is an example of how Nazi persuasion is testing loyalties and driving friends apart.
Since the spoken word, hundreds of philosophers have defined law in different ways. Philosophy allows people to study the nature of people’s beliefs which can differ over time. Not even the law is exempt from the opinions of philosophers. Seeing law in different ways allows people to come to different conclusions about legal cases. The Fugitive Slave Law was a controversial law in American history, which allowed slave-owners to capture their slaves who have fled north to free states.
Griffin had almost personally witnessed the murdering of a homosexual man in Maine, and Himmler’s orders had killed Heinz. Before the two men were murdered, they both were in anguish over their lovers. These two homosexual men also share the same pasts in a way because they had similar lives of being homosexual, losing a lover, and being murdered. Although it was Himmler’s command and notion to capture and kill thousands of Jews and homosexuals, he “did not like to watch the suffering of his own prisoners” (256). This juxtaposition is powerful because it meant that he did not wish to witness the consequences of his decisions and refused to accept responsibility for the deaths that he had caused.
J RAWLS, The Laws of Peoples-with the Idea of Public Reason Revisited, Harvard University Press: USA, 1999. John Rawls was an influential political philosopher and his publications are widely read. One of which is the Law of Peoples published in 1993 which is the subject of my study. In the Law of Peoples Rawls concerns of the general principles whereby one can uphold and be accept by the liberal people as well as the non-liberal society. “This principle is a standard for which can be useful in regulating the behavior of the citizens towards one and other.”
Otto Adolf Eichmann was one of the most important members of the Nazi Party who was accused of crimes against the Jewish people and humanity during World War 2. After the war, he went to Argentina to escape prosecution but was captured there by Israeli agents and was transferred to Israel to be judged. During the trial, Eichmann’s defense was based on Kant’s duty-based ethical theory and categorical Imperative since he overstated many times that he was only following orders. By enouncing Kantian ethical theory, Eichmann acquitted himself from moral guilt. Kant’s categorical imperative as known as The Formula Of The End
To say that if you are following an unjust law makes you unjust, it is based by your opinion. People have different meanings of what is just or unjust, thus we cannot determine whether a law is just or
The law is an intriguing concept, evolving from society’s originalities and moral perspectives. By participating in the legal system, we may endeavour to formulate a link between our own unique beliefs and the world in which we live. Evidently, a just sense of legality is a potent prerequisite for change, enabling society to continue its quest for universal equality and justice. Aristotle once stated that "even when laws have been written down, they ought not to remain unaltered".
In this source analysis, I will look into the speech given by German Social Democrat, Otto Wels on March 23, 1933. It should also be mentioned that Thomas Dunlap translated this speech into English, which will be the primary source for this essay. The speech given by Wells was in protest to Hitler’s Enabling act; a law that would help provide Hitler and his followers with a legal path towards a dictatorship. The vote for the enabling act and the speech given by Wells, were held in the Reichstag on the same day, but as history has shown, Hitler’s Nazi Party prevailed, and the democratic makeup of the Weimer Republic was washed away. The significance of this speech is quite prevalent today, in retrospect to the grisly past of the Third Reich,
Positivist says that there is no obligation to follow a law morally. But in some cases for example (MURDER) it is good to obey law due to its moral content. Another place where it is good to follow law is to solve a coordination problem for example (driving on your right side). In most of the cases our own moral judgements helps us in deciding to obey law or not. The main issue here is how we should view the law morally, whether law in itself is generally a good thing?