The Paradox of Just Law

In a 1984 essay reproduced in his Ethics in the Public Domain, Joseph Raz considers an apparently successful argument for the conclusion that the more just a law, the less reason one has to obey it. Raz labels this argument the “paradox of the just law”. The argument looks paradoxical in appearing to sustain a conclusion which itself appears obviously false. At first blush, we want things to be going something like the other way around, so that the more just a law, the more reason one has to obey it. Indeed, immediately after introducing the paradox, Raz endeavours to show that it can somehow be dissolved. He concludes that the paradox is “merely apparent” because “overstated”. In Quine’s terms, the paradox of just law is a “falsidical” one: its conclusion is “not only at first absurd but also is false, there being a fallacy in the purported proof”. <br><br>In this paper, I endorse the same basic conclusion about the paradox of just law as Raz does. That is, I conclude that the "paradox of just law" does not demonstrate that the more just a law, the less reason one has to obey it. Any appearance to the contrary arises only because of a series of overstatements in that argument’s presentation. Some of those overstatements have been noticed before. However, I think one overstatement that plays an important role in generating the air of paradox has been underemphasised so far. It is this: as Raz presents it, the argument purports to establish an inverse relationship between a law’s justice and one’s reason for obeying it (“the more just and valuable the law is…the less [reason] to obey it”). Not only is it (very) implausible that such an inverse relationship obtains, but the argument’s premises do not come close to establishing that it does. Instead, those premises establish, at most, the very different conclusion that there is no positive correlation between a law’s justice and one’s reasons for obeying it. Whilst that very different conclusion might initially strike some people as counter-intuitive, on reflection, it hits on an important truth. Once we notice this, any paradox evaporates.