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The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics welcomes Scott Hershovitz for a discussion of his upcoming book Law is a Moral Practice in a panel discussion with Zoë Johnson King and Eric Beerbohm.
Law Is a Moral Practice asks, what is law? And how does it relate to morality? It's common to think that law and morality are different ways of regulating our lives. But Hershovitz says that this is a mistake: law is a part of our moral lives. It's a tool we use to adjust our moral relationships. The legal claims we advance in court, Hershovitz argues, are moral claims. And our legal conflicts are moral conflicts.
In his book, Hershovitz supplies fresh answers to fundamental questions about the nature of law and helps us better appreciate why we disagree about law so deeply. Reviving a neglected tradition of legal thought most famously associated with Ronald Dworkin, Hershovitz engages with important legal and political controversites of our time, including recent debates about constitutional interpretation and the obligations of citizens and officials to obey the law.
Leavened by entertaining personal stories, guided by curiosity rather than ideology, moving beyond entrenched dichotomies like the opposition between positivism and natural law, Law is a Moral Practice is a thought-provoking investigation of the philosophical issues behind real-world legal debates.
Scott Hershovitz is the Thomas G. and Mabel Long Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He directs the University’s Law and Ethics Program, and is the co-editor of Legal Theory. His academic work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, The Yale Law Journal, and Ethics; he has also written about philosophy for the New York Times. In addition to Law is a Moral Practice, Hershovitz is the author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids (Penguin Press 2022).
Eric Beerbohm is the Director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics and the Director of the Center's Fellows-in-Residence and Undergraduate Fellowship Programs, as well as a Professor of Government at Harvard University. His philosophical and teaching interests include democratic theory, theories of distributive justice, and the philosophy of social science. His latest book project, Gaslighting Citizens, examines how politicians can target our evidence about our evidence, and concludes that this form of manipulation raises distinctively democratic worries.
Zoë Johnson King is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and a Fellow-in-Residence at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics. She works in ethics, metaethics, epistemology, decision theory, and philosophy of law. Her current primary research project lies within moral psychology and foguses on issues involving motivation, agency, and responsibility. Johnson King is also interested in praise and praiseworthiness, as well as the evaluation of everyday morally imperfect people.