Law and morality
done? Aren’t legal propositions then just a type of moral judgement? Indeed, philosopher Joseph Raz argued that judges who speak of law as imposing obligations are assuming that the law is, in fact, morally binding. Overall, legal positivism’s claim that the law is morally neutral seems inherently in conflict with Hart’s assertion that normativity and the internal aspect have a substantive role in the nature of law. Ultimately, while we might argue that conceptual naturalism and reductionist positivism lie at their respective extremes in the spectrum of debate around the nature of law, Hart’s attempt to create a middle ground that incorporates both concepts of morality and law, whilst also asserting a clear distinction between them, seems inherently contradictory. Instead, we might conclude that the law is morally non-conclusive (as opposed to neutral); though we may disapprove of its content, we still see the law as generally morally binding, and yet conflicting obligations may in any situation override our moral obligations – hence, we are able to maintain the practical merits of positivism (that legal validity is non-conclusive to the question of obedience), while avoiding the difficult claim that legal obligation and moral obligation are independent.
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