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Incommensurability, Practices And Points Of View: Revitalizing H.La. Hart’S Practice Theory Of Rules, Eric J. Miller

Eric J. Miller

The standard reading of H.L.A. Hart’s practice theory of rules is that it failed to provide a sufficient normative basis for a theory of law. That standard reading rests upon a significant misunderstanding: that Hart has an exclusionary reason approach to law. Instead, Hart understands law to be a social practice, one capable of generating valid norms that not only block the operation of moral norms, but which are wholesale incommensurable with them.

Wholesale incommensurability entails that law, as a form of social practice, constitutes a discrete normative system in which the truth-conditions of legal propositions are distinct from the …