Can There Really Be Law in a Society of Angels?

Abstract

Authorized coercive enforcement mechanisms is a feature of every existing institutional normative system we would characterize as a legal system. Indeed, it is so prominent in existing legal practice that it seems also to be a paradigmatic feature of law. Despite this, most contemporary theorists deny that authorized coercive enforcement mechanisms are a conceptually necessary feature of law. These doubts have been grounded in concerns about the conceptual status of international law, as well about whether law exists in a hypothetical society of angels who are motivated always to obey law without any need for authorized coercive enforcement mechanisms.In this essay, I consider whether this second concern – the “society of angels” example – succeeds in showing that such mechanisms are not a conceptual feature of law. I will argue, in essence, that the society-of-angels argument depends on assumptions about the psychological features of the “angels” that are simply too far removed from what is possible for us (i.e. human beings) in the conditions in which we live to tell us anything of theoretical significance about our legal concepts. Insofar as it our legal practices, which result from the problems to which our circumstances give rise, that, on Raz’s methodological view, construct the content of our legal concepts, the society-of-angels argument is simply not equipped to do the work it is contrived to do. Otherwise put, I argue that our concept of law explicates a normative institutional system that is distinctively human; as such, society-of-angels thought experiments tell us nothing about the proper content of a conceptual theory of law.