Philosophy, Morality and Law – Observations Prompted by Professor Fuller’s Novel Claim

Abstract

Professor Lon L. Fuller has done more than any other American philosopher of law to retain for jurisprudence the job of finding connections and interdependencies between law and morals. But for the example of his dissatisfaction, others would have been content with the positivist's truism that the validity of law is one thing and its morality another. We stand indebted to him on many counts of being made to think when we thought we knew. I take Fuller's recent book, The Morality of Law, to be an unsuccessful attempt to establish a novel claim about law and morality. I shall consider in the first part of this article the nature of this claim and why Fuller fails to establish it. In the second part I shall examine certain contentions which I believe underlie this claim, and which, properly articulated, are in fact of considerable importance for legal and ethical philosophy.