Open Access

Hanna Dębska

• Democratic rule of law has been struggling with the occurring problem of pluralism of values. It is therefore still faced with the dilemma of ordering the relationship of law and ethics, namely with the question whether in the issue of legal solutions the priority is granted to ethics or to law. In the case of dominance of the positivist paradigm, it is all the more important because the ethical issue is marginalized in it. It turns out that the same authority, deciding on similar issues, at the junction of two areas: ethics and law, can make mutually contradictory decisions: once giving priority to ethics, whereas - at different times - to positive law. On a closer analysis, this contradiction proves illusory because under the guise of protection of a positive paradigm, the hidden fact is that the axiological decision underlies the resolution concerning law. This decision protects the values that have priority in the scale of preferential value of decision-making body. The example considered in the article concerns the interface between ethical and legal norms against selected rulings of the Constitutional Court. The doubts that arise in this context may be in future avoided or perhaps, if necessary, resolved by adopting a two-aspect model of legal norm. This model in its vertical approach has an evaluative element. This allows to deem the seemingly contradictory decision in similar cases as justified one. It also shows that in practice the rightness of the resolution takes precedence both over ethics as well as over law.