Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
2003
Abstract
The relation between law and morality is a point of contention amongst legal philosophers. There are several issues: first, the extent to which law should incorporate moral standards; second, the effect of moral status on legal validity (the "validity question"); third, the effect of legal validity on the obligation created by the law (the "obedience question"). Because most positivists concede that it is desirable for law to accord with notions of justice and morals and that law often incorporates morals, the first issue features less prominently in the positivism-natural law debate. This article examines John Finnis's views on the latter two issues: the validity question and the obedience question. In doing so, this article points out the implications of the manner in which positivism and natural law theory deal with these questions.
Keywords
unjust laws, legal validity, natural law theory, legal positivism, John Finnis
Discipline
Jurisprudence
Publication
Regent University Law Review
Volume
15
First Page
195
Last Page
221
ISSN
1056-3962
Publisher
Regent University School of Law
Citation
TAN, Seow Hon.
Validity and Obligation in Natural Law Theory. (2003). Regent University Law Review. 15, 195-221.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/700
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2291605