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13 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 1 (1993)
The Dependence of Morality on Law

handle is hein.journals/oxfjls13 and id is 15 raw text is: The Dependence of Morality On Lawt TONY HONORE* I Morality and Law The relation of morality to law forms a central part of legal philosophy. It is a complex topic; but over the last forty-five years much has been done to unravel its complexities. Though many have contributed to this process, for clarity and candour Hart's writings still stand out, as they do for the depth and range of the debate they have provoked. This contribution to the series in his honour will not however directly assess his views or those of his critics. Instead it will proceed from a different, though in some ways traditional, point of view. It will be in parts more political than philosophical. Much writing about morality and law rests on an unstated premise. The premise is that we can determine what morality requires independently of the law of a community. What is right or wrong, good or bad, can be settled by rational argument without recourse to the formal institutions that make up a society's laws and legal system. If morality is universal, the same for everyone, that is still more clearly the case. Laws vary from one society to another, morality does not. Arguments of principle can settle what conduct is morally right or wrong, good or bad. This autonomous morality then provides a blueprint against which to judge laws and legal systems. Do they come up to scratch when set against the blueprint? A whole series of questions then emerge. Are moral requirements, or some of them, necessarily part of a society's law? How far should they be made part of it? If a law violates these requirements, is it invalid? Are legal obligations 'obliga- tions' in the sense in which moral obligations clearly are? Or are they obligations in a different sense, and with a different force? Over the forty-five years since Hart reopened the debate about law and morality at Harvard in 1957,1 these and cognate issues have been keenly contested. On all of them the last word remains to be said. But is the underlying premise correct? Can what morality requires be settled independently of law? Or is the picture of morality and law as model and copy in some ways misleading? Without reverting to the view which saw morality as a t A version of the eighth H. L. A. Hart lecture sponsored by the Tanner Trust and delivered in Oxford on 12 May 1992. I am grateful to Joseph Raz and John Gardner for commenting on an earlier version and to Ronald Dworkin who presided over and others who attended the seminar on 13 May which followed the lecture. * All Souls College, Oxford. 'Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals': (1958) 71 Harv LR 593-672. Oxford University Press 1993 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies Vol 13, No 1

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