PHL271H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Liberal Democracy
Document Summary
Dworkin: positivism and the separation of laws and. Hart argued that a law could be a rule in a legal system without necessarily having any moral basis. Hart thinks that if you are a legal positivist, you would be able to steer between the decisions of the reactionary and those of the anarchist. That is, someone who doesn"t question whether a law is moral and someone who blindly disregards laws. Hart draws a distinction between a law"s moral force and its legal force. That is, if a law has been properly legislated, then it has legal force, but that doesn"t settle whether it has moral force, or whether it draws a moral obligation. There is thus room for us to question whether we should obey a given law. Hart believes this will allow us to have clearer debates about what the law ought to be, as we will separate it from what the law is.
