5 - The Conventionalist Reason Account

Summary

In Chapter 5 I scrutinize the theory of legal obligation put forward by Andrei Marmor. I start out by introducing the basics of Marmor’s legal conventionalism and his view of legal obligation, which I will qualify as a minimalist statement of the reason account. Then, I critically engage with a distinction that I take to be central to Marmor’s study of legal obligation: the distinction between obligations within a practice, or internal obligations, and obligations that are external to it. Marmor claims that legal obligations are obligations of the former type. I will argue that a conception constructing legal obligation as an internal demand cannot account for the characteristically genuine bindingness of the duties arising out of the law. With that done, I will radicalize my critical stance by arguing that, at least on one plausible interpretation, Marmor’s account of legal obligation depicts legal obligation as a perspectivized duty, namely, a demand that is justified exclusively ‘from a certain point of view’. This picture is objectionable, since perspectivized obligations inherently lack genuine binding force.