7 - A Revisionary Kantian Conception

Summary

In Chapter 7, by building on the positions defended in my critiques of the social practice account, the interpretivist account, the conventionalist reason account, and the exclusionary reason account, I will put forward an entirely different conception of legal obligation. This conception, which is alternative to any other existing theory, I will call the ‘revisionary Kantian conception’ of legal obligation. The revisionary Kantian conception embodies both the features constitutive of the general concept of obligation simpliciter and the views on legal obligation theorized in contemporary legal philosophy, on which it seeks to improve. So, by combining the claims defended in the positive in defining a concept of obligation with the claims made in the negative in rebutting the main contemporary theories of legal obligation, one gets the materials out of which to construct an alternative theoretical account of legal obligation. The resulting theory of legal obligation I present as the revisionary Kantian conception can be summarized thus: legal obligation is a reason for carrying out certain courses of conduct, a reason engendered by the law and stating that such conduct is required as a matter of intersubjective considerations.