ABSTRACT Most theorists agree that our social order includes a distinctive legal dimension. A fundamental question is that of whether reference to specific legal phenomena always involves a commitment to a particular moral view. Whereas many philosophers advance the ‘positivist’ claim that any correspondence between morality and the law is just a function of political circumstance, natural law theorists insist that law is intrinsically moral. Each school claims the crucial advantage of consistency with our folk concept. Drawing on the notion (...) of dual character concepts, we develop a set of hypotheses about the intuitive relation between a rule’s moral and legal aspects. We then report a set of studies that conflict unexpectedly with the predictions by legal positivists. Intuitively, an evil rule is not a fully-fledged instance of law. (shrink)

In this discussion of Emad Atiq's article "There are No Easy Counterexamples to Legal Anti-Positivism" I pose three challenges to his construction of an Inclusive Anti-positivism. I firstly argue that, contra Atiq, the moral facts that both ground IAP and allow it to satisfy the extensional challenge are sometimes reducible to social facts. In Section II, I briefly discuss internal- and external-to-practice appraisals of legal norms. Finally, in Section III, I touch upon the divergent explanations of legal normativity IAP and (...) positivism offer. (shrink)