The proposal is to be positioned at the intersection between two relevant directions of research currently ongoing in the field of legal philosophy. The first is the ROL, which is most often defined as the political ideal that arbitrary power shall be tempered by legal rules. The second one is the ethics of virtue, an approach heralded by Anscombe (1958), who urged to pay attention to topics which had been neglected by contemporary ethical theories, such as virtues and vices, motives, emotions and moral character, moral wisdom or discernment. The ROL is one of the main legal values for the international community (see UN General Assembly 2625 (XXV) 24/10/1970, and the UN Millennium Declaration, 8/9/2000), whose purpose is strengthening legal requirements in the domestic and the international domain (Palombella 2009). Even though the ROL is a contested concept (Waldron 2016), and there is a rich and complex literature on it, Kofi Annan’s definition expresses the cruciality of its point for the life of communities: “[the ROL is] a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards. It requires, as well, measures to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of the law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness and procedural and legal transparency” (UN Doc. S/2004/616, para. 6).
The starting point of our analysis is that the fast growing literature on the ROL is mainly interested in offering an anatomical approach, primarily focused on stipulating elements of legal institutions, rules, and practices, and sometimes achievements, that are seen as adding up to the ROL (Krygier 2019). We shall contrast the anatomical approach with a teleological one that will be develop below. In 2016, the European Commission for democracy through law (the so called Venice Commission) has drawn a checklist which includes standards and benchmarks the Member States shall meet, such as legality, legal certainty, prevention of abuse of powers, equality before the law, access to justice, judicial independence and so forth in order to be granted access to the EU and to maintain membership. Different influential accounts come from legal theorists. According to Fuller (1964), law must be general, clear, prospective, noncontradictory, practicable, publicly promulgated, relatively stable, applied impartially by officials subordinated to the same rules. Recently Raz (2019) has expanded its requirements: the process of reaching decisions should be fair and unbiased; relevant arguments and information should be considered; decisions should be reasonable; government actions must be undertaken in the interests of the governed; the ROL must be part of the public culture, embedded in education and public discourse. Finnis (1992) underlines judicial independence, public trials, the review of trials, and access to justice for the poorer. Our point is that the anatomical approach could be contrasted with a teleological approach, which rather than focusing on what purports to be its institutional anatomy, tries to detect its internal goal (its telos). The teleological approach will facilitate the possibility/necessity of practitioners’ actions finetuning with the ROL, better responding to the creativity and flexibility of human action. On this point, the research meets a second line of enquiry, that is the so called Virtue Jurisprudence (Solum 2003), which applies the approach of ethics of virtues to the practice of law (Amaya & Michelon 2020).The revival of the ethics of virtues has produced the aretaic turn, a line of research strongly pursued in the contemporary debate as an alternative to utilitarianism and deontologism, two dominant trends in the field of professional ethics that, among other implications, have the effect of dissociating the professional performance from the moral agency (MacIntyre 1999). In contrast, the virtues approach is typically oriented to integrate agency into professional performance (Trujillo 2013). This approach, which has a long tradition both in Western and Eastern cultures, is being renewed, expanded and applied to many legal activities, and enriched by the outcomes of relevant acquisitions in the field of emotional intelligence (Goleman 1995, Nussbaum 2001), character education, and professional skills (https://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/). The idea of laying down a definition of the ROL with the tools and the resources coming from virtue ethics and jurisprudence is still underdeveloped and requires advancements.