Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T11:04:21.981Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Disagreement in Practical Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2014

Liam Murphy
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access

Summary

Throughout its history, up until the present, many have doubted that the dispute over what makes law is a substantive dispute. When Glanville Williams (1945, 146) said that this was “a verbal dispute, and nothing else,” he was speaking for many others, before and since. My aim in this and the following chapter is to try to get some perspective on the distinctive kind of disagreement positivists and nonpositivists have, in order to see better both why they think it matters and what the prospects for progress might be.

One thing is clear – the disagreement is long-standing and convergence seems unlikely. But there are two cases to consider. Lack of convergence sometimes reflects a lack of genuine subject matter, or at least lack of important subject matter, and sometimes it does not. It is helpful to start by considering some apparently similar debates from moral and political philosophy (as does Dworkin 2006, 145–62).

Disambiguation

Persistent disagreement and misunderstanding about key normative ideas can be important in legal, moral, and political argument because of the ideological use to which conceptual entrepreneurship and the exploitation of unacknowledged assumptions can be put. Consider this discussion of liberty:

A person does not exercise his liberties when he kills or enslaves another; he does not vindicate his property rights when he steals from another. If he is restrained from these actions by another, he cannot claim a loss of liberty, but only the loss of an ability to act to which he was never entitled. Liberty is best understood as freedom from force or falsehood, not as a maximization of the things which are under one's disposition and control.

(Epstein 1979, 489)
Type
Chapter
Information
What Makes Law
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law
, pp. 61 - 72
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×