Moral Inquiry and the Problem of Autonomy

Law's Morals

When we say of someone, “He has the morals of …(an animal) (a saint),” we engage in a commonsense way in the same activity that sociologists pursue in a professional way: (1) we construct from the description of a person's behavior the implicit normative principles that guide the person's actions; (2) we separate the descriptive parts of an inquiry (what are the principles guiding the behavior?) from the ultimate evaluative issue (should this person's morals be approved/condemned?). Of course, in the commonsense case, evaluation is often just a step behind description – to say that someone has “the morals of an animal” would normally serve to censure as much as to describe. It may even be that most of the time when we talk this way about “the morals of a person,” we implicitly intend to censure: We could say that someone “has the morals of a saint,” but it seems more natural, when praise is intended, to say simply that someone “is a saint.”

Putting aside this last question of whether a disparaging judgment is normally intended, we can talk about “law's morals” in the same way that we do a person's morals: We can describe the ways that legal systems present themselves to those subject to them and reconstruct from that description the implicit normative principles that underlie the legal system's actions.