β Scribed by Harvey B. Natanson
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Casual observation of the judicial process leads to an obvious conclusion: Citizens of a nation are subject to its laws. The truth of this statement, however, does not validate the further proposition that citizens of a nation ought to be subject to its laws. In other words, the nornaative does not necessarily follow from the descriptive. That most Germans obeyed the Nazi regime, for example, is not sufficient ground for inferring that they ought to have followed that authority. Clearly, for normative assertions to be given serious consideration, they must rest on a more adequately warranted basis. Is there ample justification, however, for the claim that a nation's citizenry ought to be subject to its laws?
If rigorous proof of normative propositions is essential to their justification, then it is apparently impossible to demonstrate them as certain or even highly probable without the benefit of arbitrary re-definition of terms or the acceptance of system-building postulates as self-evident axioms. There are, however, less demanding methods for dealing with the normative. Of the numerous approaches to legal obligation, two will be considered: one of these may be termed the American-traditional, and the other, the Humeanpragmatic.
While they may not provide an absolute solution to the general normative problem at issue, these two, approaches do furnish answers within limited contexts. It is a prime purpose of this paper to apply these methods to one specific problem involving the legal imperative, the situation of some American Negroes. These people, under threat of penalty, must obey the law, but ought they to do so? Tradition's answer, which rests on a theologicallygrounded postulate, is properly obtained from John Locke's second dissertation on civil government, from which the founding intellectuals drew some of their philosophical justification both for the genesis of the United States and for the legal obligation of its citizens.X And a relevant pragmatic ap-* Editors' Note: In view of the need for open discussion o~ the problems of our day, the Editors of The Journal of Value Inquiry wish to publish, from time to time, frank and responsible articles on controversial public issues in addition to papers offering a more scholarly treatment of concepts and principles. The above article is the second in this series.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES