O problema ético: como separar o bom do mau direito

Abstract

After sophists and Socratics inaugurated the ethical problem in the history of Western thought, the difference between good and bad law came to occupy a central place in legal philosophy. Different contexts to the expressions ethics, morals, law, justice, semantic confusion between genus and species, when such terms are applied; the idea of natural law, which stimulated criticism and the struggle against the status quo; the positive law established by the winners’s ethics, all of this is part of the development of the history of ideas in western civilization, and its exposition is the goal of this text, in order to demonstrate the difficulties in the determining of the ethical content of law. Through rhetorical methodology, the article analyses the evolution of natural law as a normative instance above the positive law, and, in the end, suggests an ethics of tolerance that abandons the possibility of truth as an object of the normative law.