Three metaphysical issues about robust normativity and the law

Speaker

David Plunkett, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Dartmouth College

About this event

Three Metaphysical Issues about Robust Normativity and The Law: Situating the Positivist/Antipositivist Dispute

In recent years, a number of philosophers of law have characterised the legal positivism and legal antipositivism as competing views about the ultimate grounds of legal facts (facts about what the law is in a given jurisdiction, at a given time).

Roughly, the thought is this: legal antipositivism is the thesis that legal facts are ultimately grounded in both social facts and moral facts, whereas legal positivism is the thesis that it is social facts alone.

In this paper, Professor Plunkett will make some proposals about how to best sharpen this distinction to make it more philosophically precise and useful.

Download the abstract for this discussion