Perhaps this question is related to yesterday's question regarding theology and philosophy? Moral obligations are frequently, but not always, based on a religious moral code. Whereas legal obligations are based on a secular "moral code," which certainly draws from religious beliefs, but is a distillation of these, and is allowed to evolve over time.

How to determine which rules are legislatable? I think maybe a short answer is, rules that reasonable people (hopefully in Congress) can agree benefit society as whole, are legislatable. Rules that depend on nothing more than faith in the precision of an ancient religious text, not so much. So, something like, "first, show me the clear benefit, then we might legislate."

Take, for instance, tithing and holy days of obligation. The secular laws do not make such practices either necessary or "moral," because they have been replaced with secular laws, independent of any religion. Tithing was replaced with "paying your taxes," and holy days of obligation were replaced with government holidays. So, reasonable people determined that the religious practices had merit, but without having to be tied to any religious rigor. For instance, taxes vary, depending on circumstances, regardless of what ancient religious texts might have prescribed, for tithing.

And why stop there? The same applies to keeping the Sabbath holy, and to any number of dietary restrictions. What becomes legal might have its roots in such "moral obligations," but is allowed to evolve according to what makes sense today. We have two-day weekends, not just one day, to replace the Sabbath, and we have more reliable cooking methods, not to mention refrigeration, to make most of the religious dietary restrictions unnecessary.

What is legal is also moral in a secular sense of morality, but does not need to remain frozen in time, nor does it need to depend on our perceived/guessed wishes of a supernatural being.

Legal obligation e.g rule of the land . Fortunately for me I grew up and came to an identical country (society)

Moral is a different story - here everything gets muddled !!!

Again , family and surroundings that I grew up with form my moral obligations , for some strange reason it is a natural way for my responses ...

I agree with Dr. Manfredi and Dr. Murthy

Legal obligations may be coercive in nature because it is backed by the legislature of the land with social repercussions on culprits while moral obligations are driven by purely willing intent. A morally chaste and social abiding person willingly abide by these two obligations that ensure smooth societal living.

moral obligation abides by no rules. It is a rule by itself.

Good point , following

Whatever else they do, all legal systems recognize, create, vary and enforce obligations. This is no accident: obligations are central to the social role of law and explaining them is necessary to an understanding of law's authority and, therefore, its nature. Not only are there obligations in the law, there are also obligations to the law. Historically, most philosophers agreed that these include a moral obligation to obey, or what is usually called “political obligation.” Voluntarists maintained that this requires something like a voluntary subjection to law's rule, for example, through consent. Non-voluntarists denied this, insisting that the value of a just and effective legal system is itself sufficient to validate law's claims. Both lines of argument have recently come under intense scrutiny, and some philosophers now deny that law is entitled to all the authority it claims for itself, even when the legal system is legitimate and reasonably just. On this view there are legal obligations that some of law's subjects have no moral obligation to perform.

• 1. Obligations In the Law
• 2. Authority, Obligation, and Legitimacy
• 3. Obligations to the Law
• 4. Non-voluntarist theories
  • 4.1 Constitutive Obligations
  • 4.2 Instrumental Justification
  • 4.3 Necessity
• 5. Voluntarist Theories
  • 5.1 Consent
  • 5.2 Expressive Obligations
  • 5.3 Fairness
• 6. Scepticism and anarchism
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Obligations In the Law

Every legal system contains obligation-imposing laws, but there is no decisive linguistic marker determining which these are. The term “obligation” need not be used, nor its near-synonym, “duty.” One rarely finds the imperative mood. The Canadian Criminal Code imposes an obligation not to advocate genocide thus: “Every one who advocates or promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.” The English Sale of Goods Act says that, “Where the seller sells goods in the course of a business, there is an implied condition that the goods supplied under the contract are of merchantable quality.” That these laws create obligations follows from the way “offence” and “implied condition” function in their respective areas of law, not from the language in which they are expressed.

On the face of it, some laws have other functions. A requirement that “a will must be signed” generally imposes no duty—not a duty to make a will, and not even a duty to have it signed if you do—it sets conditions in the absence of which the document simply does not count as a valid will. Nonetheless, some philosophers, including Jeremy Bentham and Hans Kelsen, argue that the content of every legal system can and should be represented solely in terms of duty-imposing and duty-excepting laws. Bentham asks, “What is it that every article of law has in common with the rest? It commands and by doing so creates duties or, what is another word for the same thing, obligations” (Bentham 1970, 294). (For a related contemporary view, see Harris 1979, 84–106.) They think that analyzing laws this way reveals what legislators or subjects most need to know: under what conditions the coercive power of law will ultimately be met. Others argue that even if such a reduction were possible, it would be unwieldy, uninformative and unmotivated, concealing as it does the different social functions that laws fulfil (Hart 1994: 26–49) and the different kinds of reasons for action that they create (Raz 1990). Others still, despairing of any principled way of knowing what a law is, have abandoned the problem entirely and tried to develop a theory of law that bypasses it (Honoré 1977; Dworkin 1978: 71–78). At a minimum, it does seem clear that whether or not all laws impose obligations, they can only be fully understood through their relations to those that do. Thus, a legal right is an interest that warrants holding others under an obligation to protect it, a legal power is the ability to create or modify obligations, and so forth.

What then are legal obligations? They are legal requirements with which law's subjects are bound to conform. An obligatory act or omission is something the law renders non-optional. Since people plainly can violate their legal obligations, “non-optional” does not mean that they are physically compelled to perform, nor even that law leaves them without any eligible alternative. On the contrary, people often calculate whether or not to perform their legal duties. Could it be then that obligations are simply weighty reasons to perform, even if sometimes neglected or outweighed? This cannot be a sufficient condition: high courts have important reasons not to reverse themselves too frequently, but no legal obligation to refrain. Nor is it necessary: one has an obligation, but only a trivial reason, not to tread on someone's lawn without his consent.

If their content does not account for the stringency of obligations, what does? An historically important, though now largely defunct, theory explained it in terms of penalty. Following Hobbes and Bentham, the English jurist John Austin says that to have a legal obligation is to be subject to a sovereign command to do or forbear, where a command requires an expression of will together with an attached risk, however small, of suffering an evil for non-compliance. “When I am talking directly of the chance of incurring the evil, or (changing the expression) of the liability or obnoxiousness to the evil, I employ the term duty, or the term obligation…” (Austin 1832, 18). Others conceived an indirect connection between duty and sanction. Hans Kelsen holds that what is normally counted as the content of a legal duty is in reality only part of a triggering condition for the mandatory norm which commands or authorizes officials to impose a sanction: “[A] norm: ‘You shall not murder’ is superfluous, if a norm is valid: ‘He who murders ought to be punished’”(Kelsen 1967, 55). And thus, “Legal obligation is not, or not immediately, the behavior that ought to be. Only the coercive act, functioning as a sanction, ought to be” (Kelsen 1967, 119).

None of these versions of the sanction theory survived H.L.A. Hart's criticisms (Hart 1994, 27–42; cf. Hacker 1973). First, they misleadingly represent a range of disparate legal consequences—including compensation and even invalidation—as if they all function as penalties. Second, they render unintelligible many familiar references to duties in the absence of sanctions, for example, the duty of the highest courts to apply the law. Third, they offer an inadequate explanation of non-optionality. “You have an obligation not to murder” cannot merely mean “If you murder you will be punished,” for the law is not indifferent between people, on the one hand, murdering and being jailed, and on the other hand not murdering at all. “The right to disobey the law is not obtainable by the payment of a penalty or a licence fee” (Francome v. Mirror Group Newspapers Ltd. [1984] 2 All ER 408 at 412). Such dicta are commonplace and reflect familiar judicial attitudes. Most important, the normal function of sanctions in the law is to reinforce duties, not to constitute them. It is true that one reason people are interested in knowing their legal duties is to avoid sanctions, but this is not the only reason nor is it, contrary to what Oliver Wendell Holmes supposed, a theoretically primary one. Subjects also want to be guided by their duties—whether in order to fulfil them or deliberately to infringe them—and officials invoke them as reasons for, and not merely consequences of, their decisions.

Sensitivity to such matters led Hart to defend a rule-based theory. He says that while sanctions might mark circumstances in which people are obligedto conform, they have an obligation only when subject to a practiced social rule requiring an act or omission. The fact that subjects use it as a rule marks it as normative. Three further features distinguish obligation-imposing rules: they must be reinforced by serious or insistent pressure to conform; they must be believed important to social life or to some valued aspect of it; and their requirements may conflict with the interests and goals of the subject (Hart 1994, 85–88). This account of the nature of obligations is not an account of their validity. Hart does not say that a legal duty is binding whenever there is a willingness to deploy serious pressure in its support, etc. He holds that a duty is legally valid if it is part of the legal system (i.e., if it is certified as such by the tests for law in that system), and a legal duty is morally valid only if there are sound moral reasons to comply with it. But, at least in his early work, he offers the practice theory as an explanation of duties generally—legal duties are the creatures of legal rules, moral duties of moral rules and so on. (Hart later modified this view, see 1982, 255–68; and 1994, 256.)

The constitutive role of social pressure is sometimes considered an Austinian blemish on Hart's theory, but there are in any case more serious problems with it as a general account of obligations (Dworkin 1978, 50–54; Raz 1990, 53–8). People readily speak of obligations when they are well aware that there are no relevant social practices, as might a lone vegetarian in a meat eating society. And Hart's practice conditions may be satisfied in cases where there is no obligation but only generally applicable reasons, as when victims are regularly urged to yield their wallets to a mugger. At best, Hart's theory will apply only to a special class of obligations in which the existence of a conventional practice is an essential part of the reasons for conformity, though even here, the theory is open to doubt. (See Dworkin 1978, 54–58; Green 1988, 88–121)

A third account is reason-based. On this view, what constitutes obligations is neither the social resources with which they are enforced, nor the practices in which they may be expressed, but the kind of reasons for action that they offer. Legal obligations are content-independent reasons that are both categorical and pre-emptive in force. The mark of their content-independence is that their force does not depend on the nature or merits of the action they require: in most cases, law can impose an obligation to do X or to refrain from doing X (Hart 1958; 1982, 254–55; but cf. Markwick 2000). That they are pre-emptive means that they require the subject to set aside his own view of the merits and comply nonetheless. That they are categorical means that they do not condition their claims on the subject's own goals or interests.

This view is foreshadowed in both Hobbes and Locke, but its most influential contemporary version is due to Joseph Raz (1977; 1990, 35–84). He argues that obligations are categorical reasons for action that are also protected by exclusionary reasons not to act on some of the competing reasons to the contrary. Obligations exclude some contrary reasons—typically at least reasons of convenience and ordinary preference—but they do not normally exclude all: an exclusionary reason is not necessarily a conclusive reason. The stringency of an obligation is thus a consequence not of its weight or practice features, but of the fact that it supports the required action by special normative means, insulating it from the general competition of reasons. Or at any rate this is what obligations do when they have the force the claim, i.e., when they are binding. The theory does not assume that all legal obligations actually are binding from the moral point of view, but it does suppose that the legal system puts them forth as if they were—a consequence that some have doubted. (Hart 1982, 263–67; Himma 2001, 284–97) And while this account is invulnerable to the objections to sanction-based and practice-based theories, it does need to make good the general idea of an ‘exclusionary reason’, and some philosophers have expressed doubts on that score also (Perry 1989, Regan 1987): is it ever reasonable to exclude entirely from consideration an otherwise valid reason? The account has, nonetheless, been adopted by legal philosophers with otherwise starkly contrasting views of the nature of law. (Compare, e.g., Finnis 1979, 231–59 and Marmor 2001).

The line is very fine. Use your conscience every time you are faced with situations where you have to make a decision like that. At the end of the day it is important to have a clear conscience about what you have just done

I agree with Dr. Manfredi

Usually moral obligations and legal obligations are inline. Moral virtues should stimulate following legal obligations.

Answered literally, codifying moral convictions in the laws of a sovereign. Abandon secularism.

Legal Obligation describes the obligation or duty that is enforced by a court of law, it can be a debt and the legal responsibility to carry out what the law asks. Example: Going to the assistance of the victim of a motor vehicle accident on a busy highway might be the morally correct thing to do, but the law normally does not impose a legal obligation on the average person to do so. On the other hand, Moral Obligation is a duty which one owes, and which he ought to perform, but which he is not legally bound to fulfill.

I think moral from inside and legal from outside that is it

Regards, Azzam

They are different: Legal enforced by community, Moral decided by the individual.

Legal commitment in the case of maturity guide to a good moral nucleus.

One would hope that law and morality would coincide but not every action that is legal is moral and not every action that is moral is legal. Moreover, some actions that are immoral ought not to be legislated against because of the impracticality and cost of enforcement of such laws (economics can also be of moral concern). Legal systems and legislators aren't perfect and mismatches due to e.g. misjudgement or unforeseen circumstances are to be expected. Unfortunately some legal systems systematically outlaw things that are not immoral and systematically legalize things that are immoral; Nazi Germany and apartheid-era South Africa are examples of that.

Good question

We may judge the owners of these "intentional" behaviors, either by lack of awareness or lack of commitment, and may be immaturity and moral lack of sense of moral or social responsibility. If we see compliance and discipline in the behavior of the people, it may be a reflection of an advanced state of awareness, discipline, commitment and urbanization, however much self-conviction and awareness, or because the owner avoids falling under the law, and then fine or punishment and social and legal accountability. In both cases, the ethical and educational value is embodied in the implementation of the law, and the ethics and ethics of the law are reflected in the commitment to its orders and intentions; to what extent does the law contribute to achieving the moral and educational dimension of the people? In other words, the fear of the law is that people will usually "gain" civilized behavior.

There isn't a simple answer, according to H. L. A. Hart the only essential universal values must be protected by the law, because usage of legal enforcement to support the moral status quo means artificial cease of process that gives value to other social institutions. Other parts of morality, that are not essential for existence of society should be enforced only by (e.g.) argumentation, by advice or by insisting, but no by legal means - on the other hand, if that part shouldn't be enforced by the law that doesn't mean we should be inactive there. According to Hart it is not proven, that the protection of the society requires protection of morality as such by legal means, hence every legal norm that is aiming to protect a moral norm that is not essential for existence of society (such as moral norms that deals with individual, private space such as sexuality) is not proportional to its aim.

Interesting, but I agree that also a difficult question to answer. As our colleagues mention in previous comments, I also see the difference in the possibility of coercion such a rule. I explain with use of these two concepts the difference between moral and legal rules to my students - moral rule is not enforceable according to typical characteristics of legal rule, especially in the case it is not legislated. E.g. in Slovakia we have the institute of good manners and business practices incorporated in the legislation, but there is no definition, so you have to look to the case law to understand the concept. And as there is not a precedental system in our country, the case law is only de facto, but not de iure source of law. For me it means that it is a quite difficult to invoke a contradiction with good manners. I consider the defining the exact border between moral and legal rule as very difficult, with regards to different legal system also.

Legal obligation describes the obligations or duty that is enforced by a court of law, it can be a debt and legal responsibility to carry out what the law asks. Obligations, on the other hand are our responsibilities as citizens or individuals of the society.

Moral obligation relates to social, human and religious values or ethics. Some values are universal in the sense that all people in different societies hold and highly assess them. Universal values include love, freedom, peace, nonviolence and dignity. Other values are local or societal in the sense that they are locally socialized and internalized by individuals belonging to a particular society. Examples of local values include honor, chastity, generosity and hospitality. Locally, values constitute what is known as customary law (informal or non-written rule that is willingly adopted and informally and internally enforced/moral obligation). Both universal and local or social values/ethics, constituting moral obligation, are not textual or written.

What is ‘legal’, regardless of being secular or religious, includes ideas, actions, customs and/or principles (of a society) that are formally acknowledged and enforced by an authority.

Very interesting discussion.

Las obligaciones legales nos obligan y vinculan a todos con independencia de nuestras creencias y pensamientos y opiniones. Intentan ordenar y hacer posible la convivencia entre diferentes en sociedades libres y democráticas. Las obligaciones morales no obligan a todos pueden existir diferencias en nuestra ética y en la creencia de lo que es correcto o no. Las reglas morales pueden suponer una fricción con las reglas legales. Recordar a Antigona. Sociales. Un saludo no he podido contestar en ingles

Good question, as a previous reply stated (paraphrasing) what is legal is moral and vice versa. The question has a different connotation depending upon which legal tradition frames the understanding. In traditional Anglo-Saxon common law traditions both perspectives while different are conceptually aligned. The common law could be described as devoted to the live discussion of real world problems and more adaptable to answering in concrete and historical terms. It is an inductive approach rather than the civilian systemisation of principle. While certainly both systems are concerned with principle.

The common law does not encourage systemisation/codification beyond what is necessary to encourage practical decision making. It does however significantly acknowledge the cultural systemisation of social mores and ethical norms in the form of precedent/Stare Decis. Common law legal doctrine by its very nature recognises and draws upon diverse and complex principles including morality and allows them to be provisionally linked in practice and decision until some other new perspective comes along. Meaning the changing social values of each time are not codified into law in some sort of legal perma-frost. Legal doctrine cannot be definitively codified as it draws its principles from specific cases, although it can throw up anomalies which have to be pruned out and the underlying principles are then highlighted.

In short, the moral experience of the community from which all law began is ever being re-stated, re-affirmed, or thrown out. In that sense, law can draw a line but only of connection between morality in terms of what behaviour is culpable or valuable and as such can set terms of obligation upon the individual and in turn society. Law in this sense tries to lay down general principles of behaviour which reflect universal common norms, this is done to support the principle of solidarity, common good etc. Law is a system of values coercing, regulating, and recognising the moral value of each individual. So by incorporating morality as far as what is recognised into an objective system of law will certainly create tension as the specificity of what is moral is ever changing.

Il faudrait plusieurs volumes pour répondre à une telle question. Elle occupe les philosophes depuis la naissance de la philosophie. Pour ce qui me concerne, il me semble que le droit est amoral. L'office du juriste est de déterminer la chose juste, la bonne proportion... que l'on dise comme il plaira. Là s'arrête son office. Il permet de rendre concrète la justice dont l'accomplissement dépend de l'auteur de l'acte.

We all remember that in Hitler's Germany there were those who were "just doing their jobs and obeying the law" while performing immoral acts. Today in the USA we have Immigration Service

(IC ) agents rounding up vulnerable "illegal aliens" and ripping families apart for Trump's deportation song...."just doing my job....enforcing the law."

What about the morality of legislators who create and pass immoral laws and the courts that endorse such laws. This puts law enforcement personnel in a terrible position....

All laws are not morally sound. Law enforcement should stop when the law is, itself, immoral. But such action takes great character and courage.

In some circumstances we read about soldiers who help prevent others from doing unthinkable things to non-combatants....standing on higher moral ground than their own comrades. But is the moral course only one of an individual's courage and ability to take the high ground?

I totally agree with Douglass. There is something not right going on almost everywhere caused by narrow self interest of some law makers.

Thank you sir! Morality is not an abstraction....we are all affected by the morality of others.

Hello,

It is generally believed that law and morality are two sides of the same coin regulating and channelling our behaviors. However, understanding the connection between the two has not always been easy. There are those who contend that law is by essence inconsistent with morality because one of the basic features of law is that it is essentially immoral. They reason that since law inherently requires public obedience, it ignores the importance of one's judgements about obeying it by ignoring people's moral autonomy which defines the nature of one's responsibility for performing specific actions. By contrast, there are those who assume that law and morality are interrelated and such a connection cannot be questioned. They claim that the interrelation of legal obligation and moral obligation can be justified because those who live in a democratic society and have chosen the government democratically are morally and necessarily obligated to respect the legal system set by the government . Obviously, public's obligation to support legal systems reveals the reality of such a connection.

Best regards,

R. Biria

Moral obligation is usually unwritten but sanctioned by human conscience and society while legal obligation is a factor of the political state and is usually part of the written public law.

Dear Ojilere, your feedback is akin to mine, where I wrote a week ago, " Locally, values constitute what is known as customary law (informal or non-written rule that is willingly adopted and informally and internally enforced/moral obligation). Both universal and local or social values/ethics, constituting moral obligation, are not textual or written.

What is ‘legal’, regardless of being secular or religious, includes ideas, actions, customs and/or principles (of a society) that are formally acknowledged and enforced by an authority".

Looking at the effect of silence in misrepresentation in contract is a good example.

This is one of the main/core issues in Philosophy of Law. One has to keep in mind that not all morality becomes law and not all law has an (obvious) moral content. In ancient times there was no real clear-cut distinction between morality and law. Nowadays, we have become accustomed to relativistic moral dynamics, so in practice morality means something different to every individual. Nonetheless, there are some common denominators that have been considered the bedrock of morality in law. These common denominators are more or less cross-cultural and may have evolved into law a long time ago and gradually have become more sophisticated, through legal engineering. One may cite the examples of homicide, theft, slander and rape in the criminal field and perhaps less obvious adultery as a ground for separation/divorce in the civil law field. These moral concepts appear to be taken from the Judeo-Christian decalogue but of course they are much more fundamental than that. They are meant to protect life, social relations and property. Perhaps there is something more fundamental more basic than the decalogue, something pre-moral. John Finnis proposed seven basic values that are pre-moral and the participation in which is necessary for the all-round flourishing of the individual. More specifically, one may want to refer to John Finnis's conception of morality that is achieved as a result (or product) of the methodological requirements of practical reasonableness. The latter being itself a basic value made up of nine of the aforementioned methodological requirements. Hence, very briefly, the link between reasonableness (recta ratio) and morality. Reasonableness being the bridge connecting this “general” morality to law. Perhaps!

I have added a set of lecture slides on this subject. They may be of help in distinguishing law from morality.