Law from the Point of View of Moral Views of Immanuel Kant and Hans Kelsen

Law is a category and a concept that has a long history in Western thought, and from the ancient Greek period to the modern period, under the intellectual-cultural developments in the Western world, it has always maintained its importance and centrality. In this study, the aim of the study is to examine the concept of law from the perspective of the moral views of Immanuel Kant and Hans Kelsen.

The concept of law is as old as the history of human thought. Law has been presented in two meanings in the intellectual heritage of mankind, one as an unchanging order related to the nature of things, the other as a criterion for organizing human life. Kant and Kelsen, as the greatest philosophers in modern ethics and thought in the West, have drawn the concept of modern law better than anyone else under this relationship of subjectivism with the world. In Kant's moral view, practical reason determines the will with its subjective law, and therefore this reason is self-determining and self-legislating, and this self-determination is the concept of freedom in modern thinking. But from Hans Kelsen's moral point of view, based on the school of positivism, affirmative laws are laws that governments pass and are different from the moral principles of the natural law school, which are considered permanent and even have divine origins according to some theories. This perception of the law is completely different from the common concept of the legal society today, and its opening is important in understanding the relationship between man and modern law, especially in determining the position of the law in a field of religious thought.