Virtue and the Normativity of Law

Abstract

This paper examines the normativity of law, i.e., law’s capacity to guide behavior by generating reasons for action, from the perspective of virtue jurisprudence. It articulates a virtue-based model of law’s normativity according to which the law generates first order reasons for action (i.e., loyalty-reasons) that need to be factored in citizens’ and legal officials’ practical reasoning, which consists, primarily, in the search for the best specification of the values involved in light of an account of the good life and the role that the law plays wherein. The outcome of this piece of practical reasoning is a judgment about what ought to be done, the rightness of which depends, on the proposed model, on whether it is a judgment that a virtuous person would characteristically do in the circumstances. This model, it is argued, has distinctive features that set it apart from some prominent accounts of the normativity of law. It may, however, be disqualified as a plausible alternative account of the normativity of law on the grounds that it fails to provide action-guidance. The last part of the paper responds to this objection in a way that unveils the relevance of the social dimensions of virtue to law’s normativity.