Law and morality

Massimo La Torre

pp. 186-224

in: William Hamrick, An existential phenomenology of law, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

As is clear from the last four chapters, one would not find anything in Merleau-Ponty's texts resembling a fully developed discussion of law and morality. And certainly one would find nothing of the way this issue has been skewed in most discussions of it in the previous two decades of Anglo-American philosophy by being focussed almost exclusively on sexuality.¹ Instead, as with Merleau-Ponty's other references to law, those that concern morality are usually situated in the contexts of politics, economics, and history. Although productive of less exciting discussions, perhaps, these contexts do at least have the compensatory advantage of generating more interesting and thorny philosophical problems.