Legal Grounds

It is overwhelmingly plausible that part of what gives individuals their particular legal or institutional statuses is the fact that there are general laws or other policies in place that specify the conditions under which something is to have those statuses. For instance, particular acts are illegal partly in virtue of the existence and content of applicable law. But problems for this apparently plausible view have recently come to light. The problems afflict both attempts to ground legal statuses in general laws and an analogous view concerning the role of general moral principles in grounding moral statuses. Here I argue that these problems can be solved. The solution in the legal case is to recognize an element of self-reference in the law's specification of what gives things their legal statuses. The relevant kind of self-reference is a familiar part of the legal and procedural world. It is immanent in at least some familiar legal or broadly conventional, procedural practices. The lessons of this discussion of legal statuses can then be applied to the meta-ethical debate over moral statuses, yielding a view on which moral principles also incorporate an element of self-reference.