Agency Morality and Law

How does law possess the normative force it requires to direct our actions?<br/><br/>This book argues that this seemingly innocuous question is of central importance to the philosophy of law and by extension of the very concept of law itself. It advances a position grounded in the secular natural law tradition and in doing so addresses the two success criteria for this position head on: <br/>Firstly that commitment to the existence of a supreme moral principle is required; <br/>Secondly that any supreme moral principle must be identifiable through human reason.<br/><br/>The book argues that these conditions are met by Alan Gewirth's Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC) which - through a dialectically necessary argument - locates the existence of universally applicable moral norms in the concept of agency. Given the very purpose of law is to guide action legal norms must be located in a unified hierarchy of practical reason. It follows that if law is to succeed in claiming to be capable of guiding our action moral permissibility with reference to the PGC is a necessary condition of a rule's legal validity.<br/> <br/>This strong theory of natural law is defended throughout both against moral sceptics and positions within contemporary legal positivism.