Hart: la moral crítica y el concepto de obligación jurídica.

Abstract

In this article I address the problem of Hart's moral conception and support the thesis that he was a cognitivist and not a skeptic in moral matters. At the same time, he presented his conception of legal obligation as different from moral obligation. I point out the criticisms that, in his text Essays on Bentham, he presented to the conceptions of Dworkin and Raz, in terms of identifying the concepts of legal obligation and moral obligation. I point out that this impacted his theory not to separate too much from the imperative theories of Bentham and Austin because in his new conception, legal obligation has a more coercive content. I conclude that Hart is right in maintaining that not every legal obligation is a moral obligation and that, although he has not been able to develop a theory about the normativity of law, his theory remains an unavoidable starting point for the contemporary discussion of this problem.