Conscience and Law in legal treatise of Father Fray Miguel Agia

• Grant number: 13/06454-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2013
• End date: August 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of America
• Principal Investigator: Rafael Ruiz Gonzalez
• Grantee: Elaine Godoy Proatti
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

summaryThis project aims to highlight the relationship between the legal world and the moral sphere, and to demonstrate the extent to which decisions and judgments were based on Catholic moral theology in seventeenth-century Spanish America.Within the legal sphere, we are interested in analyzing the royal law and its interpretation, concerning its fair application. This perception is possible in the study of the interpretation that the jurist makes about the law and the aspects related to it, such as the local reality, social structures and the specific circumstances of colonial space. Therefore, the interpretation and its considerations presented are found in the consciousness of the judge and in the seventeenth century, consciousness was guided by Catholic moral theology. It is Moral Theology probabilistic that guides the action of the judge in his role as the righteous say, causing, in the interpretation of the jurist, the clash between the subjective consciousness and written law itself.Conscience and Law, their interpretive and experimental clashes will be explored on this research with the following questions: How does the use of agency, customs, plurality of opinions from different jurists and theologians and the flexibility of the law in colonial Spanish society can demonstrate, from legality to morality, a sense of moral conscience opposed or not to the law? That is, how to determine the role of Catholic consciousness in the analysis of law and its interpretation? How to find, within the speech of Law, an action intentional and motivated by the Catholic faith?