Do the Poor have the Duty to Obey the Law?

PAULA GAIDO

Law, Politics, and Morality: European Perspectives III. Ethics and Social Justice

Duncker & Humblot

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2007; p. 121 - 130

The question of the bindingness of the law is one that has been posed ever since the beginnings of the philosophical thought with the purpose of elucidating the sense in which people can be said to use legal norms to justify their actions. Throughout history it has been certain acts, aberrant from an ethical point of view, that have revived the theoretical interest in search of a satisfactory answer. At present, it is the situation of the extremely poor in supposedly democratic and abysmally fragmented societies as regards the distribution of wealth that refreshes the discussion. At the end of the ´90s a sharp institutional and economic crisis took place in Argentina, which renewed the discussion on the obligation of obedience to the law of the extremely poor. In the paper I critically analyzed the arguments of Roberto Gargarella and Carlos Rosenkrantz about this issue. Both coincided in the existence of a situation that would justify the cancellation of duty of obedience to the law: the situation of alienation, but differ in which is the relevant test to determine when people are in such situation. I considered their answers unsatisfactory, and offered an alternative test to define the situation of alienation, taking into account the answer given by Thomas Hobbes.