LAW AND MORAL JUSTIFICATION

• Autor(a) principal: Faggion, Andrea
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Kriterion (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/kriterion/article/view/25647
• topic: law; justification; authority; justice

Many prominent legal philosophers believe that law makes some type of moral claim in virtue of its nature. Although the law is not an intelligent agent, the attribution of a claim to law does not need to be as mysterious as some theorists believe. It means that law-making and law-applying acts are intelligible only in the light of a certain presupposition, even if a lawmaker or a law-applier subjectively disbelieves the content of that presupposition. In this paper, I aim to clarify what type of moral claim would be suitable for law if law were to make a claim to be morally justified. I then argue that legal practice is perfectly intelligible without moral presuppositions – that is, that the law does not necessarily make moral claims