This chapter aims to make space for the view that law possesses full-blooded normativity in a top-down way. Here is the dialectic of the inquiry: What would have to be true of morality for the claim that some specific practice is full-bloodedly normative to be plausible? The chapter assumes that the practice of morality as a whole has full-blooded normativity in the sense that its requirements give one genuine reasons to act, irrespective of one’s subjective wants, desires, and beliefs. The focus is on what it means to say of a specific practice that it partakes of morality’s normativity. The reason is simple: it should be an open question whether this or that practice has full-blooded normativity. For if it is not possible for any particular practice to have full-blooded normativity, then the question of whether law has full-blooded normativity would make no sense from the get-go. The account put forward builds on the idea of obligations of role. A practice, has full-blooded normativity when it instantiates a distinct set of obligations, one that pertains to people in a particular capacity, such as friends, parents, doctors, or teachers. The proposition that there are distinct moral practices, which are not reducible to a single moral concern, is of course disputed territory in moral philosophy. But if this proposition is accepted, one can ask, by analogy, whether legal practice instantiates an obligation of role and, as a result, bears the attributes of full-blooded normativity. This way of proceeding perceives the relationship between law and metaethics differently: it shows that law’s claim to full-blooded normativity ultimately depends on contestable assumptions about the nature of morality as a whole.
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