This implies that the controlling authorities, whoever they may be, can by fiat make or change whatever laws they see fit. There is a sense in which this is true, providing they have to power to do so. And if they do so, us law-abiding citizens have no choice but to comply. — Fooloso4

Changing the law is something controlling authorities may do, for the better or for the worse. Whether a choice to abide by them or violate them is available will depend on the circumstances.

So doe this mean that when the US Constitution says: "Congress shall make no law ..." this really means it shall not do so unless or until it can if it so chooses?

That would require an amendment to the Constitution which can only be made as set forth in Article V, and is no easy thing:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

So, it's very unlikely. But who knows? We were stupid enough to adopt the 18th amendment (Prohibition) which was effective in 1920, and it took us 13 years to adopt another amendment repealing it.

How can virtue be found in metaethics? — baker

Odd... I said it wasn't found in metaethics.

So, it's very unlikely. — Ciceronianus the White

This assurance is not as comforting as it once was. There are those with considerable influence who are right now working to get the states to call a convention.
https://www.commoncause.org/resource/u-s-constitution-threatened-as-article-v-convention-movement-nears-success/

While I think Natural Law is at worst a chimera, at best a misnomer, — Ciceronianus the White

Having been exposed all my life to wildly disparate perceptions of single things, by different people, you’d think it would be “ho hum.” But I still get surprised. Here you see Natural Law as a chimera, where I see law as pretender to Natural Law. LOL! It’s a good thing that we disagree, I suppose.

I walk ninety miles through a physical wilderness of reality, climb atop a mountain and look back over the land I have traveled, seeing nature; seeing reality. An awesome sight it is. Beautiful. Some years later I enter a bank, or some other financial institution, and recognize there on the wall a plein-air painting rendered from the same vantage where I had stood. I recognize the place. That painting can travel, and go places, to banks and galleries, and elsewhere. And when it gets there, it can “speak” to people who have never seen the place. They recognize what the painting represents. But they know the map is not the terrain. It is merely a map. It is simply a painting. A subjective interpretation of what it real. They know nature is no chimera. They know it in the evolution of their bones. They may want to go see the place someday. But if they do, it will be familiar to them, because it is the stuff they are made of. Yet there are a few people who are satisfied with the painting alone. They think that painting is real. And it is. It is paint and canvass and frame. But it is a mere pretender to the glory we all, in our hearts, know exists out there in a reality we understand, have evolved with, but may never see.

It’s all good.

You write of two separate things. DEMOCRACY which is a totally awesome social organization beginning with Athens, which advances civilization, and the Military-Industrial Complex the US became after defeating it in Germany. The US was the modern Athens and Germany the modern Sparta. — Athena

I write only of what our organic documents would have us aspire to. You are correct, though. We have certainly gone off the rails.

I especially like Youngquist's book "Mineral Resources and the destiny of Nations". — Athena

I think I shall look that up, thank you. Your sentence calls to mind something I wrote a few years ago, out to Utah and Arizona:

"It’s a fur piece from the Vishnu Schist to the distal twist. Climbing from the depths of the Grand Canyon to the tip of a bison horn will cover some miles of vertical distance, and one thousand seven hundred fifty million years.

And from this are missing tens of millions of years of steps on this Grand Staircase below Escalante. It’s entirely possible that everything we know has come and gone, several times, and left no trace. Hell, there was the “Ancestral Rockies”, a mountain range arose and reduced to a sea which lay where my Rocky Mountains now stand. Again. How do you wrap your brain around that? How do you look at these granite peaks and see them melting rapidly away, like an ice cream cone on a hot summer side walk? How do you see that continental crust, that sidewalk, and the countless trillions of tons of rock above it? How do you see that as light and fluffy, floating on a magma sea? The oceanic crust is too heavy to support us. It lies beneath the waves.

How do we know there was no creature before us, better than us, smarter and more artsy? We don’t. We don’t know schist."

You said:

Their virtue is not to be found in their metaethics, though. It is found in their commended actions. — Banno

from which I surmised that you hold that virtue can be found in metaethics, it's just that the virtue of Stoicism and Early Buddhism cannot be found in their metaethics, but is found in their commended actions.

I wondered how can virtue be found in metaethics to begin with.

Where the law applies equally to all, including members of the controlling authorities, it's possible to contend that the laws govern us all. — Ciceronianus the White

I want to follow up on this. Earlier you said:

The law is a system of rules adopted by or which were adopted by a controlling authority or authorities in a nation or society ... — Ciceronianus the White

If the controlling authority, however improbable we may hope it is, decides to reject the law as it is now written and practiced and institute new laws favorable only to its sovereignty, ignoring the rights and well being of its citizens, then this would be entirely lawful. In so far as that is the case legal positivism seems to rest on the assumption that might makes right and justice is the will of the stronger.

If the controlling authority, however improbable we may hope it is, decides to reject the law as it is now written and practiced and institute new laws favorable only to its sovereignty, ignoring the rights and well being of its citizens, then this would be entirely lawful. In so far as that is the case legal positivism seems to rest on the assumption that might makes right and justice is the will of the stronger. — Fooloso4

In determining whether, and stating whether, a law exists legal positivism makes no claims regarding whether it is right or just. Whether a law exists doesn't depend on its merits.

Having been exposed all my life to wildly disparate perceptions of single things, by different people, you’d think it would be “ho hum.” But I still get surprised. Here you see Natural Law as a chimera, where I see law as pretender to Natural Law. LOL! It’s a good thing that we disagree, I suppose. — James Riley

The belief that there are discernable, forever and everywhere applicable laws governing human conduct enshrined, as it were, in nature, is what I dispute. We tend to disagree just what those so-called laws provide. For example, some people feel homosexuality, gay marriage, and certain sex acts are contrary to natural law. Some feel abortion is contrary to natural law. Recourse to claimed natural laws is too often made to justify what is mere prejudice or custom. The response that folk who think natural law is something we feel it isn't don't know what the true natural law is, merely serves to establish there is no such law.

he response that folk who think natural law is something we feel it isn't don't know what the true natural law is, merely serves to establish there is no such law. — Ciceronianus the White

You fail to draw a distinction with a relevant difference between Natural Law and the law. We disagree what the law provides, and recourse to the law is too often made to justify what is mere prejudice or custom. The response that folk who think law is something we feel it isn't don't know what the true law is, merely serves to establish there is no such law.

In this light, it is the law which merely struggles to say what Natural Law would say about a given situation in dispute. It toddles along behind the Natural Law, trying to learn from it, tweak itself, explain, justify, respond to all the little nuances that Natural Law shows as necessary to justice. All those thousands of little variables that go into the consideration of what we are to do with a given homicide are just the law trying to address arguments made by a party in distinction of facts. Someone once said, in accord with Natural Law "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and reduced it to writing and the law. Then, over the course of millennia, the law ran head first into Natural Law, where vagaries were found, nuance, and reasons to not be so stupidly simplistic as the original law. Then we had all the levels of murder and all the defenses and all the different punishments etc. That is simply the law trying to catch up with Natural Law when the law realizes how stupidly simplistic it was/is.

One of the things I walked away from the law with was this: It seemed to be primarily designed to keep the peace, not through the application of justice, but through the exhaustion of the party's emotional and financial resources to the point where they would not engage in self-help. I never once saw what I thought was justice. And that was not simply a failure on my part to agree with the result. Rather, everyone, parties, counsel, the judge and all hangers-on, walked away having lost for having touched the law. Winners were still beaten and the stick had won.

The one legitimate argument for total war is it's realistic understanding of the need to deprive the enemy of the will to resist. The law is just a slow roll version of total war and, just like war, even the "winners" have to pay.

In determining whether, and stating whether, a law exists legal positivism makes no claims regarding whether it is right or just. Whether a law exists doesn't depend on its merits. — Ciceronianus the White

It seems to me that determining whether a law exists is rather straight forward. Interpreting and applying the law, not so much.

If we look at legal practice things are not so clear cut. Consider "penumbra", legal activism, and stare decisis.

You fail to draw a distinction with a relevant difference between Natural Law and the law. — James Riley

The fact I've said I think "Natural Law" is at worst a chimera, at best a misnomer, seems to me to indicate I've drawn a significant distinction between it and positive law.

The fact I've said I think "Natural Law" is at worst a chimera, at best a misnomer, seems to me to indicate I've drawn a significant distinction between it and positive law. — Ciceronianus the White

You've entirely failed to distinguish Natural Law from law. Calling X "this", does not distinguish it from Y. Are we to make a leap from your understanding that because Natural Law is "at worst a chimera, at best a misnomer" to the notion that you hold the opposite to be the case for law? That therefor the law is the opposite, or at least not those things, or at least not as much those things? Because you have not said so. Instead, you tried to describe Natural Law, and when I told you the same descriptions are applicable the law, you have not argued otherwise. You avoided distinguishing the law from those traits you ascribe to Natural Law. I don't believe you can, because the X in the sand is more a chimera than the sand itself, or the stick that was used to draw it, or the person who wields the stick.

You've entirely failed to distinguish Natural Law from law. — James Riley

You astonish me, I must admit. I'll try to state clearly what I think should already be clear.

I have no idea what you think to be Natural Law, or why you feel there is such a thing.

However, I think there is no law given by God. I think there is no law imposed or prescribed by Nature applicable to how we should act. That's mostly because, to put it very simply, I think "law" is an enormously complex set of rules or regulations applicable to human conduct, a system or resolving disputes regarding those rules and regulations, and system of enforcement related to them, adopted and accepted by controlling authorities within a nation or society. I think law is an entirely human contrivance, and to use the word to describe what is not of human contrivance is improper, and confusing at best.

If "Natural Law" is claimed to consist of "laws" governing our conduct which were not created and adopted by us, I believe there is no such thing. I think it probable that people who proclaim there is such a thing as Natural Law do nothing more than state that there are purported "laws" which have not been developed by human authorities which they believe should have universal application.

from which I surmised that you hold that virtue can be found in metaethics, — baker

Again, odd.

You've entirely failed to distinguish Natural Law from law. — James Riley

Astonishing.

Again, as you define what you perceive to be the ills of Natural Law, you fail entirely to show how the law does not suffer from those same ills, and then some. The best and only thing you have done to distinguish them is to point to pen and paper. But again, that is a distinction without a difference, and it actually serves to prove out Natural Law when pen and paper are following it. When we perceive injustice, we try to correct it with pen and paper. But the perception of injustice is Natural Law. It is the appeal to reason that makes the law more than a stick, and reason is found in Natural Law. It reminds me of the old (paraphrasing here) "I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it." LOL! That's the law running head first in Natural Law. It then continues apace in efforts to reduce the feeling to writing. And it is that writing which suffers all of the ills you mistakenly attribute to Natural Law, and then some.

Astonishing. — Banno

Indeed!

Remarkable. I don't think I've ever encountered someone who thinks so differently than I do, and whose understanding of words is so unlike mine. Why that's the case may be worthy of study in itself, like some other novelties. Perhaps it's because I haven't climbed that lofty mountain you mentioned earlier, and so cannot survey the world from its summit as you do. But that's a different inquiry.

Normally, I'd think it would be obvious to anyone who bothered to read the OP itself, let alone the balance of my posts in this thread, that I sympathize with the view of legal positivism that whatever merit a law may or may not have, and whatever it's "ills" may be as you put it, has no relation to its status as a law. So, your statement that a law may be defective in some sense, which is something I've acknowledged more than once in this thread, has nothing to do with my position. You may proclaim that from your mountaintop as much as you please, but it is entirely irrelevant.

Your claim that our "sense of injustice" is Natural Law is interesting, though, as it suggests that what you think to be Natural Law is in not a law or set of laws by any definition, I think. It is--unsurprisingly--a sense; a feeling, a belief. That sense may be entirely appropriate as a law may well be unjust. That doesn't make it something other than a law, however. Please don't say I haven't said what I think law to be, as I have, more than once.

If you maintain Natural Law is our sense of what's just or injust, right or wrong, that may explain much, though, as in that case you haven't been referring to law of any kind, you've been referring instead to what you claim is or is not moral. And a law, to be a law, need not be moral in order to exist.

I went back to your OP to see if I could find where the problem is. I think the “positivists” have set up a straw man with their “Value-free” and “assumed standard” for Natural Law, with the latter thought to be some objective, omnipotent, universal truth. It’s not and no one ever said it was. And the essence of Natural Law is Values.

In the beginning, man had lots of feelings. Five of those were feelings of what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong, and what is just. He found these feelings to be valuable to his daily life.
However, his feeling of what is just compelled him to justify his feelings before reducing that which was valuable to values. So, he used reason to justify his feelings. In the end, he had a reason. All of this, and I mean all of it, preceded and provided the reason for his Johnny-come-lately written law.

There was not universal agreement on feelings. Bob’s clan over here felt that FGM was good, and right, and just, and valuable. FGM became a value, it was justified and this formed the reason for law.

There was Sam’s clan over there who felt that FGM was bad, and wrong, and unjust and not valuable. It was not a part of their values so they did not reduce it to law. In fact, after they saw or heard about Bob’s clan, they drafted a law against FGM.

Where one man might say that a failure to recognize his law does not mean his law does not exist, so too, a failure to recognize Natural Law does not mean Natural Law does not exist. And neither Natural Law or the law are inviolate. Both are disagreed with and violated all the time. One might say the only distinction is that one is not written down, while the other is. However, that is not the case. Because the law is the Natural Law written down.

Feelings are Natural Law. In fact, at a group level, Natural Law can be defined as “feelings agreed upon.” Simple law does not exist without reason. In fact, its compelling justification is its reason. People voluntarily abide it because it has a reason. Without reason, its only compelling case is coercion. Coercion can occur with or without a writing.

So, where it is stipulated that law exists, it can be stipulated that it only exists for those who recognize it and agree with the reasons that are used to justify its value. If there is a conflict between Natural Law (one’s feelings about good, bad, right, wrong, justice) and the law, then the law does not exist because it has no valuable justification or reason. Bob’s clan can say Sam’s clan has laws, but they aren’t Bob’s clan’s laws. They don’t exist for Bob’s clan.

I think a fundamental mistake in reasoning comes from a misunderstanding of what Natural Law is. I glean this from your OP: “O.W. Holmes, Jr. is considered to be one of the proponents of what's been called American Legal Realism, which is similar to legal positivism in its rejection of natural law theory and its value-free approach to law.” [ Emphasis added ]. Natural Law most definitely is not value-free. I don’t know where anyone got that idea, but they damn sure didn’t get it from the Founding Fathers or the Enlightenment. Nor is Natural Law objectively true or omnipotent or universally agree upon. To say it is, is to create a straw man, based upon an interpretation of Natural Law that is not correct.

Our Founding Fathers found a feeling they could not justify, so they called it a self-evident truth. Not only is their truth not true, physiologically or otherwise, but they then parsed the definition of “man” so they could get around slavery. Nevertheless, it is our feeling that all men are created equal and it formed the justification, the reason, for all that followed. But all that followed was mere law.

The law does not provide the reason. Reason provides the law.

And reason is an effort to justify feelings about what is good, bad, right, wrong and just. These feelings spring from within. They don’t come from law. Feelings agreed upon are Natural Law, as far as the state is concerned.

Finally, there need not be any agreement for an individual man. The feelings are the “assumed standard” for those who feel them, and they are replete with value.

Just for clarification, Ollie accepted legal positivism's value-free approach to law.

"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."
--O.W. Holmes, Jr., speaking from the bench during court proceeding.

Just for clarification, Ollie accepted legal positivism's value-free approach to law. — Ciceronianus the White

That is a good clarification, knowing the positivists think the law is value-free. One can read his words "legal positivism in its rejection of natural law theory and its value-free approach to law” as meaning Natural Law is value-free. It all depends on what is referred to by the second "its". Personally, I think both are steeped in value.

"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice." — Ciceronianus the White

And that is where the law ceases to be the law. It becomes a mere court. If there is a conflict between Natural Law (one’s feelings about good, bad, right, wrong, justice) and the law, then the law does not exist because it has no valuable justification or reason. Bob’s clan can say Sam’s clan has laws, but they aren’t Bob’s clan’s laws. They don’t exist for Bob’s clan.

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."
--O.W. Holmes, Jr., speaking from the bench during court proceeding. — Ciceronianus the White

And yet the statue of Justice stands as the symbol of law.

And yet the statue of Justice stands as the symbol of law. — Fooloso4

The statute you refer to depicts the Roman goddess Justicia and represents Justice, one of the four Roman virtues, not the law. If it's a symbol of law, it is in the same sense that the Statute of Liberty is a symbol of the United States. Liberty isn't the United States; Justice isn't the law.

Justice isn't the law. — Ciceronianus the White

I don't think anyone is arguing that the law is not a fraud, not a chimera, not a mere pretender to justice. It's just disconcerting to have the law actually come out and admit it, ala Holmes.

We used to have a standard attack on administrative action under the APA: it was "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and otherwise not in accordance with law." LOL! Then we'd get to the law, the implementation of which was itself arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and otherwise not in accordance with justice. And that is why the law now operates largely by the stick and not by persuasion of reason. The law doesn't even pretend to reason any more. Insert multiple dollar signs here. Just STFU and do what you're told.

According to Wiki (with reference footnotes):Lady Justice (Latin: Iustitia) is an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems.

Justice is not the law, but the idea of the law without regard to justice is, in my opinion, impoverished.

Natural law as legal hinge propositions...