Crowe on 'Injustice and the Moral Obligation to Obey the Law'

Professor Jonathan Crowe of the University of Southern Queensland School of Law and Justice has published a new paper titled 'Injustice and the Moral Obligation to Obey the Law'.  The paper appears as a book chapter in Coel Kirkby, Wojciech Sadurski, and Kevin Walton (eds), Law, Politics and Responding to Injustice (Routledge, 2025).  Here is the abstract:

"It is commonly thought that injustice undermines the moral obligation to obey the law. However, injustice is ubiquitous in legal and social institutions. Does the ubiquity of injustice therefore entail philosophical anarchism? The present chapter responds to this problem by advancing a multilayered account of the moral obligation to obey the law. According to this theory, the moral obligation to obey a law depends upon three primary factors: the law’s salience as a mode of social coordination, its reasonableness, and its capacity to promote common goods. The ubiquity of injustice, on this view, does not entail philosophical anarchism. Some deeply unjust laws are incapable of imposing moral obligations because they fail on these three criteria. However, other unjust laws may be salient and even reasonable modes of promoting common goods. Governments can—and often do—employ coercive and manipulative measures to bootstrap unjust laws into moral obligations. This kind of moral manipulation constitutes a serious and understudied form of moral harm inflicted by governments on their subjects."