Law Commons^™

Law's Normative Claims, Philip E. Soper

Book Chapters

People can look at non-conforming behaviour in two ways: either the person is acting immorally or the moral theory that condemns the behaviour is mistaken. To choose the former is to reflect a confidence in the existing moral theory, while choosing the latter is evidence that moral theory for that particular behaviour is wrong. This point says a lot about the link between the descriptive and evaluative enterprises of law. The development of basic moral principles, which draws from moral intuition, is a similar process when it comes to developing social practices, which in turn draw from human behaviour. Legal …