standard.
7
Indeed, as this formulation of the contrast shows, even a consensus of convention
characteristically reflects individuals’ critical judgments as to the reasons they have to accept
an existing practice as establishing a genuine standard of conduct.It is a plausible conjecture that the failure to recognize the conceptual priority of critical
morality explains why Hart’s elucidations of the concepts of justice and morality are, as I
shall try to explain below, unduly formalistic. The requirement of intelligibility as a criticalmorality, or as an element thereof, entails substantive constraints on both the content and thefunction of anything recognizable as a moral outlook, constraints that go well beyondanything countenanced by Hart. Moreover, I suspect a shadow is also cast at this point by
Hart’s anti
-objectivist sympathies in meta-ethics,
8
notwithstanding his official agnosticismabout such questions in
The Concept of Law
. This is because anti-objectivism seriouslydiminishes the significance, even if it does not entirely erase the existence, of the distinction
between critical and social morality. If there is no objective truth in morality, ‘critical’
standards will simply be moral standards, taken to be correct by some practical reasoner orother, in terms of which some existing social morality may be criticized, even if thosestandards are not themselves embodied in any existing social practices or traditions. But a
vindication of the reasoner’s claim to take these standards as ‘objectively’ correct will always
be unavailable.