RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MORALITY, JUSTICE AND LAW



Relationship Between Morality, Justice and Law

Relationship Between Morality, Justice and Law

Although not specifically guaranteeing “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the concept of a limited government pledged to protect the rights of individuals was inherent throughout the U.S. Constitution. In the Preamble to the Constitution, the framers set out their Lockean goals: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America” (Wirtenberger, 2008). The ideas of limited government and individual rights were further strengthened by the addition of the Bill of Rights, proposed by James Madison in 1789 and ratified by the states in 1791.

Thomas Hobbes, for example, who saw himself as articulating a natural law theory, argued that the laws of nature that constitute the “true moral philosophy” are binding on all men and precede any human social conventions, in particular all political conventions (Ryan, 2007). The laws of nature, Hobbes claimed, command men to seek their self-preservation by entering a social contract through which they submit themselves to a sovereign and thereby create a government. Subsequently,

John Locke agreed that the laws of nature consist of moral laws that govern humans prior to the construction of any political institutions. Locke, however, argued that the laws of nature endowed all men with natural rights to “life, liberty, and property” and so these natural rights preceded all political conventions (Messner, 2008).

John Austin in his treatise on law, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, notably denied the claim when he argued that the concept of a law, which he defined as the sanctioned command of the sovereign, is distinct from the concept of morality (Hart, 2005). Locke's view, however, was repudiated by William Blackstone who claimed that laws that “are valid derive all their force, and all their authority” from the natural law. The question of whether the concept of morality “overlaps” the concept of law continues to be a key issue in contemporary jurisprudential debates. The so-called positivist theories of law reject the view that there is a necessary “overlap” between morality and law, while “conceptual naturalist” theories of law accept the overlap thesis (Garret, 2006). Among contemporary philosophers, John Finnis ...