Why do legal philosophers (perhaps correctly) insist on moral objectivity while dismissing metaethical inquiry?

Abstract

The author inquiries into the reasons that many contemporary legal philosophers, regardless of their theoretical disagreements about the nature of law, appear to converge in the claim to objectivity in legal and moral reasoning. This confidence in objectivity of value judgments, however, is sometimes responded with scepticism by some of the most prominent philosophers in meta-ethics, who claim that lawyers are normally not able to handle with competence philosophical arguments about the nature of morality. In response to this scepticism, many lawyers and legal philosophers advocate the possibility of a methodological, instead of metaphysic, conception of objectivity for legal reasoning. In defence of the lawyers, the author argues against Archimedeanism in moral philosophy and defends the position that it makes sense, as authors like Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz suggest, to claim objectivity for legal reasoning, inasmuch as the legitimacy of legal judgments depends on the possibility of objective assessment of legal norms.