Allegiance and Lawful Government
Ethics, Vol. 79, pp. 56-69, 1968
14 Pages Posted: 10 Sep 2009
Date Written: 1968
Abstract
This article addresses the difficult concepts behind the descriptions of a legitimate government and a merely de facto government. It examines and criticizes R.M. Hare’s venture into this difficult area, and attempts to map these concepts in a way that will explain why it is that claims involving them are indeed puzzling. It concludes that though legitimacy claims are moral claims, they are a special kind of moral claim. They are claims about pedigree rather than content, and once they are understood in this way, we can see that they have a venerable history. However, just because legitimacy claims are, in involving pedigree concepts, in many important ways like legal claims, we should not conclude that they therefore are legal claims. In this way, legal positivism enshrines a deeper respect for morality in this area than the theories of its critics.
Keywords: Legitimacy of Government, Philosophy of Law, John Locke
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