It is a familiar fact about social life that, by doing things like entering into contracts, getting married, consenting, and the like, we can change the profile of our legal permissions, rights, and prohibitions. Our ability to do so, in turn, stems from the legal powers the law confers upon us. A growing number of ethicists have suggested that we possess not only legal powers, but also moral ones: namely powers to alter what moral rights, permissions, and prohibitions we have. The majority of these ethicists also believe that we possess moral powers as a matter of “natural morality,” independently of institutions. Laura challenges this view. She argues that moral powers can only perform their defining function, and exhibit their distinctive value, if their existence and exercise conditions include certain kinds of institutional facts. She then shows that this institutionalist takes on moral powers does not come with the counter-intuitive implications often associated with it and does not deprive the category of moral powers of critical potential.

Laura Valentini is Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her work is situated in the fields of contemporary political, legal, and moral philosophy. Particular research interests include: global justice, democracy, freedom, (human) rights, political obligation, the methodology of political theory, and the relation between moral philosophy and social ontology (e.g., the morality of socially constructed norms, the nature of normative powers).