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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
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    Natural law theory is not significantly less concerned th... — Carmelics
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    Natural law theory is not significantly less concerned than contemporary legal positivism with establishing the precise boundaries and content of posited law.

    Justice & PunishmentTruth & Knowledge
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    Reasons For

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    • 1.Contemporary legal positivists have abandoned the classical positivist thesis that judges and citizens are morally obligated to comply with positive law.
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    • 2.Contemporary legal positivists endorse the Hartian position that law which is too iniquitous need not be applied or obeyed, making their concern to distinguish posited law from other standards merely provisional.
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    • 3.Natural law theories hold that sound adjudication gives priority to social-fact sources and rules pedigreed by such sources, setting them aside only when they are too iniquitous to apply.
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.Legal positivism's separation thesis—that law's existence is a matter of social fact, not moral merit—creates a methodologically distinct enterprise from natural law's moral evaluation of legal validity.
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    • 2.Hart's rule of recognition identifies law through convergent official behavior and pedigree criteria, requiring no moral reasoning about iniquity thresholds that natural law theorists like Finnis treat as central to adjudication.
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    • 3.The positivist concern with legal boundaries is therefore categorically prior to moral assessment, whereas natural law theory collapses this priority ordering, making the two traditions structurally dissimilar rather than merely differently weighted.
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    • 1.Fuller's procedural natural law and Dworkin's interpretivism both demonstrate that non-positivist frameworks can generate highly determinate legal content without the convergence on positive law sources that the claim presupposes.
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    • 2.If natural law theories derive legal obligation from moral principles that transcend enacted rules, then their apparent concern with posited law is instrumental and subordinate, not coordinate with positivism's foundational commitment to social sources.
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    Related

    Contemporary legal positivists endorse the Hartian position that law which is to...Contemporary legal positivists have abandoned the classical positivist thesis th...Fuller's procedural natural law and Dworkin's interpretivism both demonstrate th...Hart's rule of recognition identifies law through convergent official behavior a...
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    If natural law theories derive legal obligation from moral principles that trans...Legal positivism's separation thesis—that law's existence is a matter of social ...Natural law theories hold that sound adjudication gives priority to social-fact ...The positivist concern with legal boundaries is therefore categorically prior to...

    Similar

    If legal theories aim to capture the concept of law and concept posses...83%Natural law theories permit departure from posited law only to the ext...82%Natural law theory of law is approximated by Dworkin's account of law ...81%There must be something wrong with construing legal theories as mere s...81%

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    SEP: natural-law-theories
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    Does this amount to acknowledging that natural law theory is significantly less concerned than contemporary legal positivist theories to establish the precise boundaries and content of the social-fact sourced (posited, purely positive) law of our community? Not really. For (i) contemporary legal positivist theories have abandoned the thesis of “classical” legal positivists such as Bentham that judges and citizens alike should (as a matter of political-moral obligation) comply with the positive l
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    Details

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    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit