by A year ago last January, 2009, I gave my presidential address at the Society of Christian Ethics meeting in Chicago, Illinois. At that time Governor Blagoyovich was being forced out of office because of allegations that he had attempted to sell President Barack Obama’s vacated U. S. senate seat. While this was a tragedy for the state of Illinois, it made my address look prophetic. My address was, however, prepared long before Blagoyovich’s violations. The address was an ethical reflection of the phenomenon of moral disjuncture in evaluating political leaders on the basis of a too narrow focus on their personal moral actions in contrast to a misguided ethical evaluation of the morality of their public policy.
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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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