Which comes first in morality, law or love? Moral philosophy after Grotius was deeply shaped by this issue. No one denied that both law and love have a place in morals, and even those who put law first could, with Pufendorf, allow that love, as the only source of merit, has a unique importance. The priority of law is often associated with a voluntarist view of God, and the priority of love with opposition to voluntarism. Law comes first for those whose main concern is with social order, while those who give the prize to love focus on individual character. The natural lawyers did not think they needed to say much about love once they had made theoretical room for it in imperfect duties. The theorists of love had to be a little more explicit about law. In particular they had to show how to understand concepts embedded in ordinary morality that seem tied to a law-centered approach – concepts of rights and duties and obligations. But Cumberland seemed as able as Pufendorf to give definitions from which to derive his system. How could one get a purchase on the disagreement? One might, of course, show that some particular theory contained internal problems; but to get beyond that, one would need to have a way of assessing the initial premises.