by Law, Religion, and Ethics? The title of this blog might seem a bit grandiose, and it also hints at subversion– at an attempt to undo centuries of effort designed to keep separate subjects that this blog evidently proposes to bring together.
A major jurisprudential effort of the last couple of centuries, often described as “positivist,” has sought to separate law from morality. That’s a simplification, of course. Legal positivists have typically not wanted to insulate law from moral evaluation, and some have argued that the very separation of law from morality can itself serve a larger “rule of law” and essentially moral purpose. (As it happens, I’m sympathetic to that argument.) But legal positivists have typically insisted that a law’s validity and, usually, its meaning are not dependent on morality. And they have often argued, as in the famous Hart-Devlin debate, that some kinds of morality are “not the business” of the law.
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