Legal Normativity as a Moral Property

This paper comments on Brian Bix’s article ´Kelsen, Hart, and Legal Normativity´. It provides some remarks regarding the concept of normativity and subscribes to the idea that it should not be reduced to an empirical nor a moral property. The discussion is primarily focused on the current, post-Hartian thesis that reduces legal normativity to moral normativity. In this regard, on the one hand, it advances a criticism of Bix’s analysis, which at first glance rejects both forms of reductionism but, at the end of the day accepts a post-Hartian approach that treats normativity as a moral property. On the other hand, it highlights that this moralist concept of normativity is primarily based on the assumption that normative terms have a unified meaning in moral and legal contexts and that, according to that meaning, normativity is a moral property. The proposal is that within a positivist approach, it is necessary to discuss these assumptions in order to give an adequate account of legal normativity as an essential property of every legal system.