Riflessioni preliminari sull’ontologia dell’obbligo giuridico

Abstract: Preliminary Remarks on the Ontology of Legal Obligation

In this work, I am concerned with determining what legal obligation, qua a non-prudential justificatory reason, is. I will defend five claims, namely, (1) legal obligation is an abstract entity, as such specifically distinguished from ordinary, concrete entities; (2) legal obligation is ideational, meaning that it exists in thought and is therefore immaterial, as opposed to being natural, in the manner of a physical or even a psychological phenomenon; (3) legal obligation is a constitutively collective and public entity; (4) legal obligation is a thought-object, and as such it cannot be reduced to any predicate, attribute, or property of an object; (5) legal obligation is a sui generis entity, namely, an abstract reality unlike any archetypical abstract and immaterial object.