Arthur Allen Leff

Arthur Allen Leff (1935–1981) was a professor of law at Yale Law School who is best known for a series of articles examining whether there is such a thing as a normative law or morality. Leff answers this question in the negative and follows the consequences to their logical conclusions.

Leff's first major work Economic Analysis of the Law: Some Realism About Nominalism is putatively a book review of Richard Posner's Economic Analysis of the Law. In actuality it is a critique of the use of any single methodology to provide normative rules for law and morality. The article is still, today, the main critique of Posner's work and economic analysis generally and is usually read in graduate seminars on Economic Analysis (though sometimes mis-identified as the Legal Realist critique). [1]. Leff makes two fundamental proposition in SRAN: (1) that all models are only very limited views of the real world. When Posner views the world through the economic model much more is hidden than is revealed; (2) there is no system of logic for preferring one model (e.g. economic, social, political) over another unless an axiom is inserted early on into that system of logic. Leff notes that the opening of Posner's work does just that -- inserts a proposition that rational economic behavior is to be preferred to other behavior. Leff follows his insight to its logical conclusion and notes that similarly there is no way, using logic, to prove that any particular act, no matter how horrible, is normatively wrong. Put it another way, one can never prove to another person that a particular set of behaviors is right or that a different set of behaviors is wrong. He states:

I will put the current situation as sharply as possible: there is today no way of ‘proving’ that napalming babies is bad except by asserting it (in a louder and louder voice), or by defining it as so, early in one’s game, and then later slipping it through, in a whisper, as a conclusion.

Leff continues his critique of attempts to find normative rules in law and morality in Law and Technology: On shoring up a Void and Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law (the latter alludes to the title of a collection of stories by Donald Barthelme). In these works Leff attempts to directly address whether a normative morality can exist without God. [2] Leff answers the question in the negative. Leff states that absent an ultimate authority figure (i.e. God) handing down moral laws from on-high there is no reason for any person to prefer one set of behavior identified as "moral" to another. Leff terms this "the Grand Sez Who." In particular, it is impossible to resolve the conflict between the rights of the individual and the power of the collective, even though much of the time we can pretend that, for instance, the Constitution tells us where to draw the line. There are bound to be cases where we are left on our own, with no authoritative referee; there is no "brooding omnipresence in the sky", in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whom Leff quotes approvingly.

In UE, UL Leff also criticizes the views of Robert Nozick and Roberto Unger, noting that for all their differences they end up with remarkably similar solutions to the problem of resolving differences among morally sovereign individuals: agglomerations of the like-minded, geographically separated. Leff claims that this move merely shifts the problem. Against Nozick, Leff states that his entire book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is built on the naked assertion that "individuals have rights", and that an entirely different yet equally valid argument could be built on the premise "individuals have duties". The arbitrary choice of starting point decides everything.

Leff states as follows in the closing of UE, UL:

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why any thing should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless:
Napalming babies is bad.
Starving the poor is wicked.
Buying and selling each other is depraved.
Those who stood up and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot —and General Custer too— have earned salvation.
Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.
There is in the world such a thing as evil.
[All together now:] Sez who?
God help us.

Leff was an agnostic but his writings have been influential on Christian discussions of morality in the modern Era. Phillip E. Johnson has suggested that Leff's work is really a critique of the God is dead argument. [3] Johnson argues that the presence of evil in the world is evidence that there is an absolute morality which requires an absolute authority. Other Christian scholars have also applied Leff's critique to secular arguments for a normative morality. [4]

Responses to Leff

Posner has responded to Leff by stating that the purpose of any methodology or model is to simplify. Otherwise it would be impossible to achieve any kind of understanding of the real world.

Major Articles

Recent Theological Works Referencing Leff

The Gospel According to Relativity [5]

Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism [6]

The Gagging of God [7]

Nihilism and the End of Law [8]