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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that A positivist conception of law — specifically a version of the Separation Thesis — is normatively justified on the grounds of autonomy and freedom of conscience.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Lon Fuller argued that law possesses an internal morality—procedural fairness, generality, publicity—without which it cannot function as law.
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    • 2.If legal validity already presupposes moral criteria (Fuller's eight desiderata), the Separation Thesis cannot be defended as a clean conceptual divide.
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    • 3.Autonomy is therefore better protected by requiring law to meet moral standards than by insulating legal validity from moral assessment.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Ronald Dworkin demonstrated that hard cases are resolved through principles that carry moral weight and are treated as legally binding by courts.
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    • 2.If moral principles function as genuine legal standards in adjudication, positivism's rule of recognition cannot exhaustively account for what the law is.
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    • 3.Separating legal from moral requirements thus obscures rather than protects conscience, since citizens remain subject to morally-laden judicial reasoning without acknowledged moral accountability.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.There are compelling normative arguments in favor of adopting a positivist conception of law.
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    • 2.Autonomy and freedom of conscience support separating legal requirements from moral requirements in at least some spheres of conduct.
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    • 3.The Separation Thesis holds that the question of what the law is ought to be distinct from the question of what morality requires.
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