The Responsibility of Individuals for Human Rights Abuses in Internal Conflicts: a Positivist View

Abstract

When we were invited to contribute a positivist perspective to the present symposium, we did not know whether to regard this invitation as flattering or as an insult: does positivism not represent old-fashioned, conservative, continental European nineteenthcentury views—naive ideas of dead white males on the possibility of objectivity in law and morals? There is little we can do about being male and white, but we have certainly not seen ourselves as positivists of that kind. From the range of methodologies that the editors assembled, we could associate ourselves with several approaches just as much as with positivism. But in reflecting on our day-to-day legal work, we realized that, for better or for worse, we indeed employ the tools developed by the “positivist” tradition.

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