For the first SCLP seminar of the year, on Wed Oct 9, 4-6pm UK time (in the Law Library), we’ll welcome James Penner (NUS). Penner is Professor of Property Law at the National University of Singapore and co-director of the NUS Centre for Legal Theory, and a leading contributor both to the philosophy of private law and philosophy of law more generally.

Abstract below, and paper can be accessed here.

Click here to join online (hybrid format).

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James Penner – “Are Duties Burdens? An Investigation of a Normative Sensibility”

In this paper I introduce the concept of a ‘normative sensibility’. Roughly speaking, a normative sensibility is an attitude we take to the norms of some kind or the norms of some system, for examples duties in private law, the appraisal of someone’s life, or the rules of a game. To help fix ideas, I shall begin by exploring two opposing or alternative sensibilities: first, the ‘autonomy’ normative sensibility and the ‘role’ normative sensibility in judging the success of a person’s life and, second, the ‘rules’ normative sensibility and the ‘rights’ normative sensibility in thinking about private law in general and the rules of games. I shall then turn to the question of the title, opposing a ‘duties are burdens’ normative sensibility with a ‘duties are benefits’ sensibility. On the former view, which has significant support in the liberal tradition, we should understand duties as constraints or restrictions upon our freedom. Ideally, then, a life is better to the extent that its bearer has fewer duties. A perfect life would be one in which one had no duties at all. On the latter view, duties reflect our rational agency, and fall within the same practical reasoning ball park as decisions; duties have a positive valence, as means by which an individual alone or together with others advances their interests, understood as the achievement of worthwhile goals. The paper gives reasons for preferring this latter view to the ‘duties are burdens’ sensibility.