Law

Law is to be understood as a metanormative discipline which identifies certain actions as just or unjust. That is to say, law is a subset of ethics which identifies which party ought have possession in a given conflict. The purpose of law is conflict avoidance.

Law deals with the narrow question of who should prevail in conflicts. We say that the person who should win has the property right in that conflict. For example, if a farmer finds that a factory is polluting his field and ruining his crops, we have a conflict. The farmer does not want the pollution there, and the factory does. Only one party can win, and law is there to find out which party is in the right. But it is important to understand that law, as a metanormative discipline(See: Principles of Metanormative Justice (LL)), does not prescribe how individuals should behave in their personal lives beyond these conflict scenarios. Even within conflicts, law simply identifies the non-owner as the party who has initiated the conflict. It does not instruct the farmer on what crops to grow, nor does it dictate how the factory owner should run their business; it merely adjudicates the conflicts that arise between them.

Ethics is the area of philosophy which deals in general with guides to mans action—i.e. what man ought do. Specifically, law is a subset of ethics which deals with who should have possession of what, or more specifically who should be the one directing the possession of what, we can therefore define law as ethics applied to the issue of conflicts. This is specifically a subset of inter-personal ethics, contrasted with autistic ethics which deals with how the man alone should act. So ethics is made of autistic and inter-personal ethics, and law is a subset of the latter dealing not in general with how men should interact, but with the subset of interactions that are defined as conflicts.

Consider what it would mean to say that law is not in fact a subset of ethics — A claims that he cannot justify his direction of the use of a, but also that he should nevertheless be its director. What is meant by A claiming that he should direct a? This claim by A is an attempt to justify A's direction, which A claims that he cannot do, therefore A is in contradiction, we shall see shortly that contradictions are falsehoods, therefore meaning that it cannot be the case that A should be the director where said direction is unjust. So, law must be a subset of ethics—there does not exist any legal claim which is not also a moral claim.^[1]

Legal theory—natural law as science—is not a prescription for personal morality.^[2] It only expresses what ought to be permitted, not what is desirable or proper. All law does is tell you, "Okay, this is a justifiable action; this is not justified; this is criminal; this is innocent." It doesn't say, "Okay, this is criminal, and the correct way you should go about defending that crime is you have three handguns and then you get your buddies together..." That is outside the realm of philosophy. You certainly apply philosophy to that, but it's not the realm of philosophy as such to say "this is the correct way to go about defending people's rights". There is a critical distinction between the right to take a particular action and the autistic morality of that action, differentiating between natural rights and the morality or immorality of the exercise of those rights. Legal theorists are concerned solely with the explication a code of rules consistent with social cooperation, interpersonal conduct, and the maintenance and facilitation of human life.^[3]

You would certainly apply philosophy to the question: "Well, should my restaurant be serving steak or chicken on this day?" Economics applies to it, and all sorts of stuff does, but that doesn't mean this is a question within philosophy. If you were having a history of philosophy course, you wouldn't have, "What did Aristotle think about what my restaurant should serve on Wednesdays?" It's not part of philosophy. Philosophy is about the broadest abstractions you can possibly make. So, you're not going to have particular stuff, such as, "Well, what sort of bureaucratic structure should this society have?" Now, you could certainly apply philosophy to it but philosophy already has it that the non-aggression principle implies that you don't have a right to stop other people from defending their property. So, you can't have a monopolistic defense of property on those grounds, but that's still an application of philosophy.