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On the (in)significance of Hume’s Law

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Abstract

Hume’s Law that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is” has often been deemed to bear a significance that extends far beyond logic. Repeatedly, it has been invoked as posing a serious threat to views about normativity: naturalism in metaethics and positivism in jurisprudence. Yet in recent years, a puzzling asymmetry has emerged: while the view that Hume’s Law threatens naturalism has largely been abandoned (due mostly to Pigden’s work, see e.g. Pigden in Aust J Philos 67(2):127–151, 1989), the thought that Hume’s Law is a serious challenge to positivism has only grown in prominence. Our main aim is to establish that Hume’s Law is not a threat to positivism or naturalism. First, we connect extensive, but unfortunately siloed, discussions of this issue. Second, we show that Hume’s Law is not a serious threat to naturalism or positivism, for the gap between logic and such theses is very hard to bridge in a way that would make Hume’s Law able to bear this significance. Finally, we emphasize an implication of our discussion: it undermines one of the main “dialectical tributaries” in jurisprudence (Toh in Law Philos 27(5):445–504, 2008).

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Notes

  1. To be clear, we are saying some philosophical prose suggests that Hume’s Law is a direct threat, not that the authors are reflectively committed to that view. In some cases, we think context makes it clear that they aren’t. We think this is true, for instance, of Rosati’s claim that “[f]or the legal positivist … Hume’s Challenge is a direct threat” (2016: 310).

  2. See Russell and Restall (2010), Russell (2010).

  3. See Pigden (1989), Russell and Restall (2010), Russell (2010), Schurz (1997), and Singer (2015). See also every chapter in the recent volume on Hume’s Law, Pigden (2010). The understanding of Hume’s Law that is relevant in this literature, and which will be discussed here, is hence different from a barrier to analytic or a priori entailment.

  4. See the examples cited by Maguire (2017: 432).

  5. Nothing of substance hangs on this. But see Fine (2021) for a defense of the assumption.

  6. Some conventions on notation. We use “p” to denote a proposition, “[p]” to denote the fact that p, and Greek capitals to denote sets of propositions or facts depending on the context. Subscripts—“pd” and “[pd]”– denote that a proposition/fact is descriptive (or…).

  7. See Pigden (1989), Schurz (1997), Singer (2015), and Russell and Restall (2010); cf. Woods and Maguire (2017).

  8. Pigden (1989: 128), (1991: 421), and (2010: 219).

  9. See especially Rosen (2010, 2017).

  10. “[p] ← Γ” means “the fact that p is fully grounded by the facts in Γ”. Greek capitals are used variably to denote sets of propositions or facts (context should make clear what is referred to on a given occasion, see also fn. 6).

  11. Pigden (2010: 224; see also 1989, 1991). We are being explicit about where we are indebted to Pigden, but the remaining issues we raise go beyond his work. (Though Pigden (1989)’s point that property identity doesn’t suffice for entailment because property identities can be a posteriori does relate to one of our three reasons for rejecting one of the four bridge principles we discuss, N2E Link.) We also aren’t relying on Pigden’s other two main arguments for the view that Hume’s Law does not pose a serious threat to naturalism. The first is that Hume was a naturalist and endorsed Hume’s Law, so the two theses are compatible (see Pigden 2010: 134, 187; Pigden 2016). The second is that Hume’s Law is merely an instance of the conservativeness of logic: it parallels the point that one cannot derive “hedgehog” conclusions form “hedgehog-free” premises (Pigden 1991). We want to stay neutral on whether Hume’s Law is a more exciting logical theorem than this (see Schurz 1997, Russell and Restall 2010).

  12. Following Rosen (2010), we use “\(\wedge\Gamma\)” to denote the conjunction of the propositions that correspond to the facts in \(\Gamma\).

  13. Audi (2012), Rosen (2010), Trogdon (2013).

  14. Hanson (1997) points out how often logical entailment is characterized in strictly modal terms, before criticizing these characterizations. Cf. Ridge (2006) and (2014: 154–155).

  15. See e.g. Leuenberger (2014) and Skiles (2014). See Chilovi (2021) for discussion of their arguments, and for a defense of a “contingentist” link between grounding and modality (i.e., weaker than G2N Link.) Bliss and Trogdon (2016) offer similar normative examples of disablers, drawing on Dancy (2004): at the actual world a descriptive fact grounds a normative fact (that you promised to \(\varphi\) grounds the fact that you have a reason to \(\varphi\)), but other facts could disable this (e.g. the promise was made under duress).

  16. See Dutilh Novaes (2012), Etchemendy (1983), and Read (1994).

  17. While we’ve used Rosen’s (2020) formulation of supervenience, little turns on this. Our point is that the supervenience thesis entails the metaphysical necessitation of the normative by the descriptive. That is widely accepted (see McPherson 2019), and obvious in other formulations (e.g., from Väyrynen (2017: 172): □M(\(\forall\)F\(\in\)\(\alpha\))(\(\forall\) x)[Fx → (\(\exists\)G\(\in \beta\))(Gx \(\wedge\) □M(\(\forall\)y)(Gy → Fy))]).

  18. Our reasoning is familiar (see e.g. Jackson 1998). Let a be a particular item that instantiates some normative property N. It also has a maximally specific descriptive profile, D, capturing the non-normative properties and relations it exemplifies. Supervenience implies that anything that is non-normatively indiscernible from a must be normatively indiscernible from it. So anything that has D cannot fail to instantiate N: □M(∀x)(Dx → Nx). So Da necessitates Na. Coupled with N2E Link, Da will entail Na.

  19. See, e.g., Enoch (2011: 141–2). When pressed by Rosen (2017: 4) on whether he denies “the received view” of supervenience—which includes a claim about metaphysical necessity—Scanlon (2017: 895) recently affirmed that on his view the “connections [between the normative and the natural] are metaphysically necessary.”.

  20. Many—like Harrison (2013), Roberts (2018), and Sturgeon (2009)—who challenge the full supervenience thesis do not deny that whenever something has a normative property, N, it has a natural property that metaphysically necessitates N. They deny that this claim about metaphysical necessity is true as a matter of conceptual necessity.

  21. Hart’s “The Separability Thesis” is one modal formulation of positivism (1994: 185–6): there are no necessary connections between law and morality. That formulation has fallen from favor (see, e.g., Green and Adams 2019: §4.2). We’re also unsure how it’s even prima facie incompatible with Hume’s Law. But we leave this issue aside.

  22. This is because necessary facts can only be redundant elements of a (non-empty) supervenience base. The “relevant moral facts” are the facts about the moral principles that for an anti-positivist should be added to the social facts as further grounds of the legal facts. This point is further elaborated in Sect. 5 below.

  23. See Marmor (2010: 16–17) and Raz (1974: 124–5). For a helpful discussion of the relationship between Kelsen’s and Raz’s views on this, see Goldsworthy (1990: 174).

  24. See Raz (1979: 124–125; 1981: 456; 1999: 171–177); Marmor (2010: 17; 2016: §1, §3); Marmor and Sarch (2019: §2.1.2); Bix (2015: 129–131); Gragl (2017); Demiray (2015).

  25. Here’s an illustrative example: “If law is a matter of fact, not value, then what can explain its normative force? How can we derive a normative conclusion (about law's authority) from a factual premise (it's legality)?” (Coleman and Leiter 1996: 244, emphasis ours). See also Raz (1999: 154–155, and 170–177), Green and Adams (2019: §2), and Marmor and Sarch (2019: §2.1.2). Cf. Bix (2006: 7). See Rosati (2016) for especially insightful discussion.

  26. As Shapiro notes (2011: 422 fn. 23), this is “heavily indebted to the work of Joseph Raz” (see also, pp. 414–415 fn. 44); cf. Raz (1999: 175–76). Coleman notes that “Raz and Shapiro are among the strongest advocates of the moral semantics claim” (2007: 593).

  27. We won’t discuss the second strategy. Hart is often treated as the paradigmatic example of it: see Shapiro (2011: 99–100, 112, 191). There is room for debate about which camp Kelsen’s Grundnorm falls into: see Marmor (2010: 17–20, 2016); cf. Shapiro (2011: 422, fn. 26). For an excellent comparison between Shapiro’s solution and Hart’s, see Rosati (2016).

  28. For critical assessments of Shapiro’s appeal to these semantic commitments to solve the problem posed by Hume’s Challenge, see Rosati (2016) and Wodak (2018).

  29. Rosati (2016) is an exception, but does not make the same points we make here.

  30. See e.g., Shapiro (2011: 48) and Finnis (2011a: 4; 2011b: 37, 441).

  31. See Shapiro (2011: 27, 48, 269–271). Shapiro’s formulation of the thesis differs from ours below, but in ways that don’t matter for our discussion. What matters is that Shapiro explicitly characterizes positivism in terms of grounding, understood as a metaphysical relation: see especially Plunkett and Shapiro (2017: 38). Plunkett and Shapiro (2017: fn. 1) also list Greenberg (2004), Rosen (2010), and Plunkett (2012) as characterizing the debate about positivism in terms of the metaphysical relation of grounding. Chilovi and Pavlakos (2019) offer a positive argument for this claim. Chilovi (2020) puts forward a more nuanced ground-theoretic formulation of positivism than the one given here, but since these differences don’t affect the current discussion, for the sake of simplicity we shall work with the full grounding thesis. Relatedly, in their overview of the positivism—anti-positivism debate, Marmor and Sarch (2019) say the issue concerns the “metaphysical reduction of law”.

  32. Green and Adams (2019) speak of dependence as a relation that concerns what “determine[s] whether laws or legal systems exist”. Raz (1979: 65) says that certain legal claims are “true, according to the sources thesis, because of the existence of a source.”.

  33. Rosati (2016) disputes Shapiro’s solution, but doesn’t question Shapiro’s characterization of the problem posed by Hume’s Challenge—indeed, she seems to accept it. Shapiro’s account of Hume’s Challenge goes unquestioned in critical responses, such as Hershovitz (2014). And it has not been addressed outside philosophy of law—which is another respect in which our discussion goes beyond, e.g., Pigden’s. Finally, it’s worth noting that some, like Toh (2018: 18), declare that Shapiro “essentially replicates” Kelsen’s articulation of Hume’s Challenge; this overlooks the epistemological bridge principles in Legality (which don’t replicate Kelsen).

  34. See e.g. Díaz-Leon (2011), Lycan (1996), and Tye (1995).

  35. Chilovi and Pavlakos (ms).

  36. “To obtain the answer [to whether the death penalty is constitutional], positivism requires the reasoner to take note of certain social facts” (Shapiro 2011: 48, emphasis ours).

  37. Greenberg suggests that positivism is committed to an epistemic claim as a “corollary” to a metaphysical claim about dependence (2004: 159). Arguably, Raz sometimes glosses positivist commitments in epistemic terms: “A law is source-based if its existence and content can be identified by reference to social facts alone, without resort to any evaluative argument” (Raz 1994: 210–211). We thank Kevin Toh for helpful discussions here.

  38. See Smith (2017) for an interesting discussion of a similar split between practical and epistemic normativity. Smith objects to any view which posits such a split (2017: 102), but one of us has argued that Smith’s objection is not compelling (see Wodak 2020).

  39. On formal normativity, see inter alia, McPherson (2011). It may not matter here whether such domains are “genuinely normative”: what matters is that they are formally normative, since if Hume’s Law is true then it holds for all propositions with the relevant form.

  40. We don’t attribute this to Dworkin; some of the thorny issues that attribution would raise are discussed by Greenberg (2004: fn. 47). Others relate to inclusive legal positivism.

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Acknowledgements

The authors of this paper contributed equally to it. For insightful and helpful comments and discussion on previous drafts, we would like to thank Derek Baker, Esa Díaz-Leon, Manuel García-Carpintero, Jeff Kaplan, Dan López de Sa, Stephan Leuenberger, Barry Maguire, José Juan Moreso, Michele Palmira, Charles Pigden, David Plunkett, Gillian Russell, Kevin Toh, Jack Woods, and audiences at the Universities of Barcelona, Glasgow, Sydney, and UNED. On the part of S. Chilovi, this research was financially supported by the research group Law and Philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University (Grup consolidat de Filosofia del Dret, Projectes AGAUR 2017 SGR 00,823), and by the research project Social Metaphysics at the University of Barcelona (PGC2018-094,563-B-I00, MINECO FEDER).

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  1. Law School and Philosophy Department, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA

    Samuele Chilovi

  2. Philosophy Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

    Daniel Wodak

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Chilovi, S., Wodak, D. On the (in)significance of Hume’s Law. Philos Stud 179, 633–653 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01674-5

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