Why require Justice to be blind to passions? The standard model of jurisprudence offers two lines of answers: (1) Justice is about formal rationality and judging is essentially reason-giving, while emotions are irrational feelings, so justice is thus blind to passions; (2) Justice ought to be predictable to live up to the rule of law and judges should strive towards impartiality, while passions obscures judgment and instigates prejudice and partiality, so justice should thus be blind to passions, lest it decays into its very opposite. Mainstream jurisprudence also incorporates two major lines of attack against these claims: (3) Detractors argue against (1) that law suffers from indeterminacy and judges from breakfast biases; (4) detractors argue against (2) that equity requires practical reasoning when not empathy, mitigating the rigour of the law. These opinions are all grounded on specific, but often uncritically assumed, accounts of emotion. While (1), (2) and (3) are rooted in an irrationalist approach to emotion; (4) stems from a cognitivist approach to emotion. Both of these approaches are problematic. This paper attempts to shed light on the underlying accounts of emotion and highlights some problematic aspects of them. No matter if you defend (1)-(4), jurisprudents today need a better grasp on emotion in law.
Key-note at the World congress in Philosophy of Law
http://ivr2015.org/program-overview/plenary-lectures/