Abstract

Hans Kelsen is best known as one of the twentieth century’s leading legal theorists, advocating legal positivism by strictly separating the law from morality and other nonlegal elements. Despite the absence of a systematic and comprehensive moral theory in his writings, this paper presents and analyzes his scattered remarks on morality in metaethical terms, which should allow modern metaethics to better place his position on the broad map of metaethical theory. To this end, I will first describe Kelsen’s distinction between law and morality and then go beyond it by first discussing whether Kelsen can be regarded as a moral cognitivist or non-cognitivist, and subsequently by presenting a modest defence of his position in terms of democracy theory as well as a modern reinterpretation in the light of moral constructivism.