ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some thoughts on the relationship between law and the ideals of legality and governance. Law (particularly private law) forms part of the dense fabric of social institutions and understandings that give shape to human endeavour in a context of close and permanent relations. The dominance of public-law understandings of governance increasingly obscures the significance of this dimension of legality by focusing attention upon the descending structures of legal authority. The chapter addresses the nature of moral understandings which are in an important sense 'private' rather than 'public' in orientation. The intellectual shift involved in the movement from classical forms of ethical reflection to moral philosophy is one in which a concern with metaphysical ethical contemplation regarding the human telos is replaced with a secular and Protestant concern for 'the works of man'. Meditation upon the ethical dimensions of the person will then give way to a focus upon 'activity, creation, change and process, goals and purposes'.
