Natural Law and the Impossibility of Bad Laws

 Suppose one took the traditional position that an unjust law is no law at all. This has the curious consequence of having to say that there are no such thing as bad laws. When countries have codified slavery, we can't say that they have a bad law on the books, because that law isn't real to begin with. But this seems counter intuitive. We do want to say that countries have bad laws. Other than being a legal positivist, one way out of this is to draw the parallels from metaphysics more generally. So when we say that evil exists, we could say that we don't mean it literally since evil is a deprivation and deprivations don't have their own positive ontology. Rather, evil is parasitic upon being. Likewise, we can say that bad laws do exist, but that they are parasitic upon something else. What this could be, I'm not certain, perhaps parasitic upon the governing authorities, but that would be a place to start this investigation. 

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