Leslie Green Should Law Improve Morality Summary

In “Should law improve morality?” Leslie Green argues that the law is capable of causally impacting social morality, and that law should serve to better morality. His emphasis on the intimate connection between law and morality might lead one to interpret him to be an advocate for a natural law perspective. After first defining the natural law view, this paper will explicate Green's distinction between “social” and “ideal” morality. This distinction prevents the argument that morality can be changed from contradicting basic intuitions about the metaphysics of moral principles, and allows him to escape the objection to natural law which appeals to the plethora of differing moral rules different societies accept. An objection to Green's argument for the

9). Although it is certain that “morality is at the heart of the legal process,” the major challenge for a proponent of this view is to provide a convincing account of which set of moral rules are in effect in a particular location at a given time (Boyd, 2015, p. 11). Green (2013) rejects the claim that morality is a rigid, permanent entity, instead asserting that social morality is “fluid and dynamic” and subject to influence from a number of things, one of which is law (p. 474). This may initially seem implausible, as the laws which bind us are chosen by members of society while the moral principles which have normative force, in contrast, are independent of our choices (p. 475). To alleviate this worry, Green distinguishes between “ideal” and “social” morality, the former referring to which morality should be adopted and the latter to which morality is actually adopted. Since the morality practiced by a society can be grossly immoral, he holds that we should utilize ideal morality to determine what our social morality should be (p.