LEGAL PLURALISM AND THE DISPLACEMENT OF MORAL SOURCES

Abstract

Abstract: This article puts forward a critical perspective on the application of legal pluralism in the Brazilian context that differs from the approach that has become most prominent in recent decades, as represented in the literature by authors such as Eliane Botelho Junqueira, José Augusto de Souza Rodrigues, Marcelo Neves, and Luciano Oliveira. Drawing on the history of legal thought, it argues that a key factor in the rise of naturalism in legal theory was a shift in moral sources that placed reality as it is at the center of legal reflection. From this standpoint, the difficulty with adopting a pluralist approach does not lie in the alleged lack of a sense of community among actors involved in organized crime, in the absence of autonomy or identity of legal orders in peripheral Latin American modernity, or in the challenge of affirming the genuinely emancipatory or anti-capitalist character of legal pluralism. Rather, the core problem lies in the paradoxical abandonment of the normative and programmatic character of law itself.