Mark C. Murphy

_The Philosophy of Law_ is a broad-reaching text that guides readers through the basic analytical and normative issues in the field, highlighting key historical and contemporary thinkers and offering a unified treatment of the various issues in the philosophy of law. Enlivened with numerous, everyday examples to illustrate various concepts of law. Employs the idea of three central commonplaces about law - that law is a social matter, that law is authoritative, and that law is for the common good - to organize seemingly disparate topics and to bring rival views into contention with each other. The first volume in the _Fundamentals of Philosophy _series, in which leading philosophers explore the fundamental issues and core problems in the major sub-disciplines of philosophy

Philosophical anarchism is the thesis that there is no moral requirement to obey the law. I challenge philosophical anarchism by showing that there is a consent account of political obligation, two proponents of which are Hobbes and Aquinas, that manages to avoid criticisms leveled by the philosophical anarchists against consent theories as a class. ;The philosophical anarchists purport to have refuted every plausible account of political obligation; they also claim that no important practical consequences follow from the absence of this obligation. If there are no plausible candidates other than the particular theories attacked by the philosophical anarchists, then philosophical anarchism is the most defensible view. I argue, however, that the absence of political obligation would have quite serious practical consequences. The conjunction of these theses is sufficient to motivate the search for a more defensible account of the obligation to obey the law. ;I argue that there is a more defensible account of the obligation to obey the law present in the works of Hobbes and Aquinas. Although Hobbes is often viewed as initiating a wholesale rejection of earlier political theories, Aquinas' and Hobbes' views share a common form. For both Hobbes and Aquinas, the institution of political authority and the obedience to its dictates are necessary for securing certain goods--for Hobbes, self-preservation; for Aquinas, the common good. These goods are necessary constituents of each person's good. I argue, though, that for both Hobbes and Aquinas the crucial notion of obligation is that in which one is obligated to perform action $\phi$ if and only if performance of $\phi$ is necessary for the achievement of one's individual good. That each person is obligated to obey the law, then, results from obedience's being necessary for the securing of one's own good. ;I conclude by considering the objection that even if Hobbes' and Aquinas' form of argument avoids the philosophical anarchists' criticisms, the particulars of those accounts make rational allegiance to them impossible. Even if the particulars are rejected, though, their strategy presents a live and important option in the attempt to formulate a defensible account of political obligation

The central thought of Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality is that any philosophically adequate account of reasons for action has to preserve the sense of the idea that agents can act for good reasons. Though platitudinous enough, this notion embodies the central difficulty faced in the theory of reasons for action: that the notion of a reason for action serves two roles, that of explaining action and that of justifying it. It is sometimes suggested that there is mere ambiguity here: there are motivating reasons and there are justifying reasons, and never the twain shall meet. However, to adopt this expedient is to commit oneself to the view that the reasons that are good and the reasons for which agents act are entities of two very different kinds, and thus that it is impossible for an agent to act for good reasons. An account of good reasons and of motivation that enables us to explain how this is indeed possible fixes the agenda for Practical Reality.

The moral formulation of philosophical anarchism is that most persons, even in just political communities, do not have a moral obligation to obey the law. The epistemological formulation of philosophical anarchism is that most persons are unjustified in believing that they have a moral obligation to obey the law. But the philosophical anarchists’ argument strategies do not, and in fact cannot, show that belief in the moral obligation to obey the law is unjustified. And, further, given that most persons in just political communities do believe that they are under such an obligation, the moral requirement that one ought to act in accordance with one’s conscience implies that most persons have a moral obligation to obey the law. Thus the moral formulation of philosophical anarchism is false and the epistemological formulation unjustified

The contribution to contemporary philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre is enormous. His writings on ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of the social sciences and the history of philosophy have established him as one of the philosophical giants of the last fifty years. His best-known book, After Virtue, spurred the profound revival of virtue ethics. Moreover, MacIntyre, unlike so many of his contemporaries, has exerted a deep influence beyond the bourns of academic philosophy. This volume focuses on the major themes of MacIntyre's work with critical expositions of MacIntyre's views on the history of philosophy, the role of tradition in philosophical inquiry, the philosophy of the social sciences, moral philosophy, political theory, and his critique of the assumptions and institutions of modernity. Written by a distinguished team of philosophers, this volume will have a wide appeal outside philosophy to students in the social sciences, law, theology, and political theory.