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14 Law & Phil. 1 (1995)

handle is hein.journals/lwphil14 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION With this special issue of Law and Philosophy, we honor the memory of Conrad D. Johnson, who died suddenly and unexpectedly, in the prime of his philosophical career. From the time he was a graduate student in the late 1960s until his death in 1992, Johnson thought with penetration and focus about the inter- relations between law and morality. Perhaps no one did more during this period to illustrate, as he put it, the ways in which moral reasoning has benefited, and might be made more con- sciously to benefit, from ideas that are at root essentially legal in character. Struck, in his first year of graduate school, by Hart's remark that Hare's moral theory represented an excessively Protestant approach, Johnson became convinced that much contemporary ethical philosophy had failed to appreciate the importance of custom, practice, and, especially, law to an understanding of morality. Even rule-utilitarian theories (as advanced by his teacher Richard Brandt), gave no intrinsic right-making weight to estab- lished practice and institutional process. According to ideal rule utilitarianism, right and wrong depend on the requirements of rules, the general teaching of which would have the best consequences. Johnson came to the view that while the consequences of a rule or practice (compared to those of alternative possible rules) are relevant to whether it should be followed, they are not determi- native. Moral rules are collective strategies for achieving beneficial consequences, not the least of which is mutual trust. And this requires giving weight to established common practice in moral reasoning. Accordingly, he concluded, right and wrong (in a given social context) are determined by established rules, so long as their consequences are better than what could be achieved by trying to promote the good individually. Law and Philosophy 14: 1-3, 1995. C 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.