TRUST IN LAW «AS A CULTURAL PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM: THE QUESTION OF THE SOURCES AND FOUNDATIONS OF FORMAL SOCIAL REGULATORS

• Main Author: V. R. Legoyda
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MGIMO University Press 2017-12-01
• Series: Концепт: философия, религия, культура
• Subjects: law; religion; culture; sources of law; morality; legal order; divine law; justice; social regulators
• Online Access: https://concept.mgimo.ru/jour/article/view/60

Nowadays the problem of strengthening the effectiveness of law as a mechanism of social regulation increasingly calls for a comprehensive evaluation of the conditions which provide trust in law as a social institution. And this, in turn, makes it necessary to turn to the analysis of its sources, which means to do the work that brought to being the idea of autonomy of morals in the new European context. Is it really possible to deprive the law of initial “moral basis”, and the latter, in turn, fully deprive of religious foundation? Moreover, the initial syncretism is increasingly accentuated in modern social and humanitarian knowledge. The disintegration of syncretism marked the era of the birth of the Logos, and its restoration in the epoch of the myth’s revival seems quite predictable. From the standpoint of traditional values what we witness today in a number of states can be called nothing but at an attempt to introduce vice into the legal field. Many people are brainwashed to believe that professions of prostitute and doctor or teacher are equal, that there is no difference between family and cohabitation. Next in line is the legalization of same-sex marriages in some denominations that position themselves as branches of a single tree of Christianity. But world religions would not consider the vice more permissible, if it were introduced in the legal framework. Real life in that case turns into a permanent search for the shortest way to satisfy person’s selfish needs beyond morals restrictions. And how can it be harmonized with the postulate that setting up of the lines is a point the culture starts from? Trying to adapt to the rapidly changing real life, the law is in danger of being reduced to an “empty” package of manipulative technologies, justifying the dominance of “desires.” In that case, it is doomed to the extinction of its key features: the focus on common justice and legitimizing force based on the initial trust in law as an institution. The attempt to turn the law into a self-sufficient “ideal reality”, disassociated from religious and philosophical concepts about the worthy and unworthy in human behavior, deprives it of its effectiveness, devaluing its consolidating role in society; and also anticipates repressions against the people who perceive a moral norm in a dissenting way.