Spaak Torben, Legal Realism and Functional Kinds: Michael Moore’s Metaphysically Reductionist Naturalism

Naturalism is a rather hot topic in contemporary philosophy, including in jurisprudence (or legal philosophy), and many prominent philosophers make it clear that they are naturalists in some sense or other. Although Brian Leiter, in particular, has done a lot to push contemporary jurisprudents in the direction of naturalism, the best-known jurisprudential naturalists are probably still the American and the Scandinavian legal realists, who were active from the late 1920s into the 1970s. Metaphysically speaking, however, the Scandinavian and the American realists were (moral and legal) anti-realists, specifically, nihilists (or, in Moore’s terminology, skeptics), and it may therefore be worth our while to consider a metaphysically realistversion of naturalism, in order to acquaint ourselves with a broader range of naturalist accounts of law and legal phenomena. Accordingly, my choice of study object is the bold and complex theory of law espoused by Michael Moore, who maintains that...