the culprit has violated, which in turn requires as a legal consequence that the party gains an absolute right of retaliation, including a corresponding right to inflict suffering upon the person of the wrongdoer.295 Hägerström’s analysis of Thyrén’s penal theory demonstrates an interesting aspect of unchecked legal theory, namely its predilection for logical despotism which amounts to a tendency to disregard values other than the merely formal in the analysis of law.This is especially the case when it comes to issues regarding the legitimacy of different rules of law - for example, the state’s right to punish wrongdoers and the jural basis for legitimate acts of coercion. However, if social considerations are taken into account then it must be concluded that these discourses are better decided by means of evaluative considerations rather than by purely formal ones. A common denominator for legal theories is the possibility of their results leading to absurd consequences. To Hägerström, this is particularly obvious with Thyrén, whose theory, if it is uncritically implemented, has Draconic implications including the notion that the state possesses an absolute and unchecked right to punish any wrongdoer (provided that the inflicted punishment helps the state to uphold its absolute right to self-defense). Furthermore, Thyrén’s theory justifies the state’s right to criminalize what ever it sees fit, regardless of popular opinion, and that furthermore the state, on the basis of natural law, may do with the delinquent whatever it sees fit, even to detain him indefinitely, which in turn means that, according to such theories, the individual’s rights against the state in effect are null and void.296 a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 471 295 Ibid., pp. 45-50, 67, 71-72, and 75-80. 296 Ibid., pp. 65-67 and 70-71.
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