On the «Religion» of Morality: Reflections on the Normative Nature of Divine Law in the Concept of John Austin

Abstract

Philosophical and legal thought knows a number of theoretical concepts devoted to a grandiose and organic ethical and legal synthesis — the supreme unity of ethics and jurisprudence or reasoning about what is essential for law, supplemented by reasoning about what law should be. The joint task of these disciplines is to find and theoretically describe the best criteria available to the human mind for evaluating human actions. This principle of practical reasonableness, despite its incompleteness and relativity (for everything derived from man bears the signature of its own creator), would serve as a possible foundation stone for humanity in determining and understanding the highest criterion for evaluating proper behavior that only exists in the world. These are divine laws and prescriptions of their norms, this highest link in any normative hierarchy. It is the divine mind, and not the mind of mortal beings, that is the true source of any duties, from the appeal to the content of which it is possible, resorting to a suitable ethical interpretation, to «deduce» (not directly, but from the «image» that the specified content acquired through human mental activity) all other forms of obligation in one or another normative system. A striking example of such a «normative» concept turns out to be the teaching of J. Austin, devoted, if we put aside the positivist or «command» theory of the author, to the basic principles of the relationship between law (including morality) and the laws of God, ultimately to the sphere of human moral forces and freedom.