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Naturalism in Legal Philosophy


The “naturalistic turn” that has swept so many areas of philosophy over the past three decades has also had an impact in the last decade in legal philosophy.


Methodological naturalists (M-naturalists) view philosophy as continuous with empirical inquiry in the sciences. Some M-naturalists want to replace conceptual and justificatory theories with empirical and descriptive theories; they take their inspiration from more-or-less Quinean arguments against conceptual analysis and foundationalist programs.


Other M-naturalists retain the normative and regulative ambitions of traditional philosophy, but emphasize that it is an empirical question what normative advice is actually useable and effective for creatures like us. Some M-naturalists are also substantive naturalists (S-naturalists). Ontological S-naturalism is the view that there exist only natural or physical things; semantic S-naturalism is the view that a suitable philosophical analysis of any concept must show it to be amenable to empirical inquiry.


Each of these varities of naturalism has applications in legal philosophy. Replacement forms of M-naturalism hold that: (1) conceptual analysis of the concept of law should be replaced by reliance on the best social scientific explanations of legal phenomena, and (2) normative theories of adjudication should be replaced by empirical theories.


These views are associated with American Legal Realism and Brian Leiter's reinterpretation of Realism. Normative M-naturalists, by contrast, inspired and led by Alvin Goldman, seek to bring empirical results to bear on philosophical and foundational questions about adjudication, the legal rules of evidence and discovery, the adversarial process, and so forth.


An older form of S-naturalism in legal philosophy, associated with Scandinavian Legal Realism, seeks a reduction of legal concepts to behavioral and psychological categories. More recent forms of S-naturalism, associated with a revival of a kind of natural law theory defended by David Brink and Michael Moore (among others), applies the “new” or “causal” theory of reference to questions of legal interpretation, including the interpretation of moral concepts as they figure in legal rules.



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Anonymous said…
wonderful brother keep it up
October 20, 2008 at 11:16 AM
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