A Wittgensteinian-based Moral Realism: Deflating Hurd’s Moral Combat Antinomy

Résumé 0

Moral Combat by Heidi Hurd can be understood as an attempt to provide a moral justification for political authority in contrast to the various contemporary theories that are restricted to developing a conception of political legitimacy. For this, the author explores the dilemma of legal perspectivism. Such a moral dilemma is constituted by the antinomy of two proposals, each of which is linked to a theory about the justification of the use of coercive power by the State: weak retributivism, which holds that the State should not normally punish (innocent) people that break unjust laws; and systematic values, which holds that the State should normally punish people who have broken unjust laws because of the prevalence of systematic values, such as, for example, majoritarian democracy and the rule of law. Hurd defends the primacy of weak retributivism. The thesis of this study is that Hurd’s antinomy is dependent on a specific conception about morality, which maintains that its content is perfectly determined. The hypothesis is that, once this view of an underdetermined and dependent morality is accepted on a holistic view on social practices and forms of life, the proposed antinomy is usually answered by considering the values underlying the social functioning of institutions.