Here it is price noting that utilitarians sometimes seem to recommend that they derive their utilitarianism from sure information about human nature; as Bentham once wrote, “nature has positioned mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.
Insofar as it will probably plausibly be claimed that the content of a norm being enforced by society as regulation doesn’t conform to the pure regulation, this can be a legitimate floor of ethical criticism: on condition that the norm being enforced by regulation is unjust, it follows, based on conceptual naturalism, that it is not legally valid.
The legal guidelines in UK, for example, are completely different from those within the US, as a result of individuals (principally judges and other officials) really follow completely different rules, or basic norms, in Kelsen’s terminology, about what counts as law of their respective jurisdictions.
At this level, Kelsen took an extra step again, accepting that the concept of a basic norm is doubly contradictory: it’s self-contradictory in that it involves an infinite regress; in addition, since no such norm really exists, to presuppose the existence of such a norm contradicts reality.
Let us now see how Kelsen thought that the essential norm helps to explain the sense wherein regulation is a normative domain and what this normativity consists in. The first and essential point to comprehend is that for Kelsen the idea of normativity is tantamount to a genuine ought”, as it have been; it’s a justified demand on practical deliberation.