Are Fundamental Legal Reasons Internal? A Few Remarks on the Hartian Idea of the Internal Point of View

Abstract

The fundamental reasons for officials to apply the criteria of validity available within the system’s rule of recognition, according to a basic reading of The Concept of Law, could be of various provenience (moral, conventional, traditional, other). However, to think of these criteria as genuine reasons it must be supposed that they are internal reasons that refer to agents’ motivational set. In this paper, the idea of the internal point of view is juxtaposed with the notion of “internal reason” as introduced by B. Williams. It is argued that if fundamental legal reasons are to be normative (authoritative)—at least in a conceptual sense—they must be internal reasons, which are moral in character. It is just another way to build an argument that Hart simply presented an “over-weak” theory of the internal point of view.