부산대학교 도서관

Summary: We make judgments about the law—about our legal rights, obligations, and powers—all the time. How should we interpret these judgments, and the practices that give them sense and effect? What are they judgments of—what are legal rights and obligations? Although these judgments and facts play important roles in our day-to-day lives, it’s not entirely clear what they amount to. In this dissertation, I propose that these legal judgments and facts are best interpreted as moral judgments and facts of a certain sort. In effect, then, I suggest that we understand law as morality—as a part or a branch. What could this mean? In short, the animating idea is that living in a political community makes it both possible and necessary to ask new kinds of moral questions. Among other things, it forces us to ask what effects, if any, the actions of political institutions have on what we may expect and demand from one another, and on whether it is fitting or permissible for us to hold one another to those demands by (say) intervening to disrupt certain plans or by imposing fines or punishments after the fact. To treat law as morality is to hold that notions like “legal right” and “legal obligation” enable us to formulate, debate, and answer some of these distinctive moral questions.In the essays that follow, I argue that we can and should embrace this picture of law—that doing so resonates with our ordinary commitments and explains our practices in a way that gives them evident sense and value. In Chapter 1, I examine Mark Greenberg’s theory that law is the branch of morality created by the actions of legal institutions “in the legally proper way.” I argue that we should reject Greenberg’s version of the law-as-morality picture, but I suggest that Greenberg’s innovative view holds important lessons about the shape that the picture should take. In Chapter 2, I propose and defend an alternative theory. In short, I argue that law is the branch of morality that members of a political community have the privileged standing to hold one another to, in light of their community’s past political decisions. I believe that this account better captures our ordinary understanding of law and its various roles in a political community. In Chapter 3, I extend the law-as-morality picture to tort law. I argue that it helps us appreciate a view on which there is tort law, but there are no distinctively legal wrongs. Instead, I argue, we should understand tort law as a tool that enables a political community to recognize and respond to ordinary interpersonal wrongs that are, in some contestable sense, matters of public concern.