Chapter 9, Laws and Morals Summary and Analysis

There is no one relation between law and morals and there is at least some connection between them. But the question arises whether law must rest on morality or not. Hart divides the two answers to these questions into two camps: natural law and legal positivism. Legal positivism holds that it is not necessary that laws satisfy the demands of morality even if they happen to do so as a matter of fact. The most explicit rejection of this view is the natural law tradition, that man-made law, to be valid, must conform to certain principles of human conduct, discoverable by reason.

Positivists tend to see natural law as built on a fallacy: that it confuses what is law with what ought to be law. They also see natural law theory as part of an...