ABSTRACT
This chapter’s topic is legal liberalism, the view that all the role obligations possessed by the state’s lawmakers are grounded in the state’s purposes. This view has so few extant defenders (probably none, in fact), is so extreme, and seems vulnerable to so many obvious objections that it requires a lengthy discussion of its own, even though its truth follows immediately from the truth of the very weak version of political liberalism that was defended in Chapter 4. Importantly, legal liberalism seems incompatible with even a modest version of positive legal moralism, which is the view that lawmakers should treat an act’s disvalue as a reason to criminalize it. Having first distinguished negative legal moralism (with which legal liberalism is compatible) from positive legal moralism, this chapter focuses on the arguments for the latter. It engages with R.A. Duff’s argument for a modest version and Michael Moore’s argument for a strong version, and finds both arguments flawed. The rest of the chapter is given over to responding to objections to legal liberalism.
