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Deception and Expression: The Puzzling Rationality of Symbolic Legislation

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Exploring the Province of Legislation

Part of the book series: Legisprudence Library ((LEGIS,volume 9))

Abstract

Symbolic legislation is usually depicted as both irrational and deceiving. This chapter aims to show how symbolic laws could be considered rational in more than one sense. It will also argue that symbolic legislation is not necessarily deceitful. First, an account of rationality in legislative justification will be offered in terms of the provision of justifying reasons. Second, symbolic laws will be analysed with reference to Manuel Atienza’s ‘levels’ of legislative rationality. Third, the view of symbolic legislation as a communicative approach to law-making will be examined and partially endorsed. Fourth, two types of symbolic laws with an instrumental purpose will be identified, only one of which is actually deceiving because the real legislative purposes cannot be publicly and openly declared. Finally, two additional types of symbolic laws will be distinguished: purely irrational laws and purely expressive laws (rational but not instrumental). Regarding the latter type, legislators respond exclusively to values and principles by expressing them through laws which have no further purpose—and their aim can be declared in public justification, although it calls for strong identification with those same values and principles.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a criticism of this model, see Searle (2001). As is well known, for Williams, statements of the form ‘A has a reason to φ’, if interpreted in relation to A’s subjective motivational set (i.e., A’s wishes), are ‘internal reason statements’; ‘external reason statements’, in turn, are true or false, independent of the agent’s motives or wishes. See Williams (1981), pp. 101–102 and Redondo (1999), pp. 32–37.

  2. 2.

    Of course, I might be asked about my reasons for holding such a belief, in which case, I would have to explain my reasons for believing (epistemic reasons), in addition to my reasons for acting (practical reasons).

  3. 3.

    See, for instance, Bongiovanni (2018), pp. 4–15.

  4. 4.

    Some have followed Donald Davidson in further distinguishing between explanatory reasons and motivating reasons: they endorse a form of psychologism and claim that, in order to explain an action, we need to see reasons as the combination of a belief and a desire (what Davidson called ‘primary reasons’). In this account, motivating reasons properly said would be the alleged facts that, in the agent’s view, count in favour of the action (regardless of whether or not these facts are real). However, for the present purposes, keeping this latter distinction is useless, and therefore, I will use ‘motivating reasons’ to refer to causally explanatory reasons (see e.g. Davidson 1963; Álvarez 2017; Darwall 2003; Bongiovanni 2018).

  5. 5.

    The Italian Cassation Court (Corte di Cassazione) probably made this very point—though in a pretty muddled way—in a 1988 decision, where it distinguished between ‘the intention of the legislator as the objective will of the norm (voluntas legis)’, on one hand, and ‘the will of the individual participants in its shaping process’, on the other (Cass. Civ., Sez. III, 21 May 1988, no. 3550).

  6. 6.

    See, e.g., Meßerschmidt (2019).

  7. 7.

    See Petersen (2014), pp. 258–261.

  8. 8.

    The first reference to internal and external rationality in adjudication is in Wróblewski (1971). Wróblewski (1979) later applied this distinction to legislative rationality.

  9. 9.

    See Hassemer (1989); Siehr (2016), pp. 322–324.

  10. 10.

    Merton (1968), p. 105. However, Aubert himself admits that he is using “rather loosely” the term “function”, which could “mostly be replaced by terms like cause, effect and motive” (Aubert 1967, p. 98).

  11. 11.

    ‘[L]eyes hechas para no ser cumplidas, o bien para no producir los efectos declarados’.

  12. 12.

    See also Oliver-Lalana’s and Simões Nascimento’s chapters in this volume.

  13. 13.

    The other levels being those of ‘formal-juridical’ or ‘systematic’ rationality (R2) and ‘axiological’ rationality (R5). R2 is aimed at legal coherence and pursues the values of security and predictability; R5 is aimed at liberty, equality and justice, and it pursues ethical values such as human dignity, consensus, etc.

    It should be noted that in Atienza 2019 (p. 176) the values pursued at the level R4 are indicated in the English original as ‘Social effectiveness or efficiency’; nonetheless, here I have made reference to social effectiveness or efficacy, since in Atienza’s Spanish versions of the model the term employed is ‘efectividad’, which is not translatable into English as ‘efficiency’ (which is rather the equivalent of the Spanish ‘eficiencia’, indicating a wholly different concept). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this problem.

  14. 14.

    Moreover, the very idea that the law is made not to be complied with or enforced would imply an obvious conflict between Atienza’s pragmatic and teleological rationalities, since pragmatic inadequacy would be subservient to the attainment of the legislators’ social ends. See Ferraro (2019), p. 149.

  15. 15.

    Other aspects of this technical irrationality include the fact that adjudication is entrusted to the giudice di pace (Justice of the Peace), a lay magistrate whose functions are mainly (though not exclusively) of civil adjudication; the sanctions the giudice di pace applies are mostly compensatory. Therefore, this magistrate does not seem apt for adjudicating this kind of ‘crimes without victims’ (Manna 2016, pp. 8–9).

  16. 16.

    See Sartor (2009), pp. 17–20.

  17. 17.

    Van Klink (2016) speaks of a distinction between two ‘concepts’ of symbolic legislation, one negative and one positive; nonetheless, it seems more plausible to speak of two conceptions referring to the same concept.

  18. 18.

    Van Klink (2016), p. 20.

  19. 19.

    See Evans (1988), p. 117.

  20. 20.

    See Luzzati (2012), pp. 74–88.

  21. 21.

    Van Klink draws this distinction from Harald Kindermann (1988), pp. 230–239.

  22. 22.

    Van Klink also proposes to keep the negative connotations regarding the expression ‘symbolic legislation’, whilst ‘communicative legislation’ should be used when connotations are positive. See Sect. 5.

  23. 23.

    See Paliero (1990), p. 537.

  24. 24.

    See Amelung (1980), pp. 59–61.

  25. 25.

    See also Kalberg (1980).

  26. 26.

    Nozick (1993), p. 28.

  27. 27.

    See, for instance, Sunstein (1996), p. 2023.

  28. 28.

    See Siehr (2016).

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Carolina Fernández Blanco for her very valuable comments and suggestions on a draft for this chapter. Heartfelt thanks are also due to all the participants to an online seminar on Legislación simbólica: ¿racional y razonable? for the Càtedra de Cultura Jurídica of the University of Girona, where a previous version of this paper was presented.

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    Francesco Ferraro

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    Francesco Ferraro

  2. Department of Legal Sciences “Cesare Beccaria”, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Silvia Zorzetto

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Ferraro, F. (2022). Deception and Expression: The Puzzling Rationality of Symbolic Legislation. In: Ferraro, F., Zorzetto, S. (eds) Exploring the Province of Legislation. Legisprudence Library, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87262-5_6

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