A consideration of fundamental importance in the philosophy of law is that of the distinction between law and morality. The importance of the distinction is illustrated by the main questions to which it gives rise: (1) How far and in what sense should the law of a community seek to give effect to its morality? (2) Is there a moral duty to obey the law even when it does not embody morality, and, if so, are there any limits to this duty? (3) When a legal rule directs conduct that morality forbids, which should the ... (100 of 10,323 words)Law, morality, and natural law
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Plato, marble portrait bust; from an original of the 4th century bce; in the Capitoline Museums, Rome.
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St. Thomas Aquinas, fresco by Fra Angelico, 1447–51.
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Niccolò Machiavelli, oil painting by Santi di Tito; in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.
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Title page of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651).
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Montesquieu, detail of an oil painting dated 1718; in the Académie Nationale des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Bordeaux, France.
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Immanuel Kant, print published in London, 1812.
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Karl Marx.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes