Urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitungen in elektronischen Systemen. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2015 Andrea Porciello, Catanzaro (Italy) Fuller’s Theory in “Quest of Itself”: The Fear of Immoral Morality AbstrAct: In this article I will make a brief reconstruction of Fuller’s thinking on the canons of the Inner Morality of Law and in particular about their relationship with the External Morality, the substantive goals of a concrete legal system. This is in order to understand whether the relationship between these two moralities can be meant as a relationship between morally neutral instrumental techniques (legislation) and extra-legal morally oriented purposes, as Hart argued against Fuller; or instead, as Fuller believed, the relationship between the two moralities, or more generally between any means and its end, is of a dynamic type, in virtue of which the end is somehow modiied and even deined by the means used for its achievement, and the means itself is to be considered as conceptually inconceivable. I. Introduction Lon L. Fuller was certainly one of the greatest legal philosophers of his time, surely on a par with Herbert Hart and Ronald Dworkin. His production was substantial; 1 he exhausted the problems on the agenda of the philosophical questions of those years; his thinking was, and is, still powerful and original. Despite this, and for reasons not completely understood, his legal philosophical studies, especially in Europe, with a few exceptions, have scarcely been considered and commented upon. His work has, effectively, been relegated for a long time to an incomprehensible obscurity. Even to- day, the vast majority of cases, when it comes to Fuller, refer to him as the American philosopher who dared to question his prevailing Hartian positivism, or as the scholar, at least according to many, who lost his battle against Hart: it is almost as if his ideas were not able to emit enough of their own light, requiring that one produced it elsewhere. And Hart was certainly the ‘star of light’ in those years! It is not easy to indicate the reasons for this general attitude. One explanation may be sought that perhaps Fuller was a philosopher ‘too modern’ for his time. His line of research opened with the 1940 book The Law in Quest of Itself 2 seems to anticipate the trends and concepts taken up and developed by the new critics of legal positiv- ism: and this, only since the seventies. This is the opinion of Dyzenhaus, who along with Luban, is one of Fuller’s greatest contemporary interpreters: “the reason for this obscurity is that Fuller posed the principal question of philosophy of law, in so novel a fashion, that he was too far ahead of his time to be properly appreciated” 3 . This 1 For the main bibliography of Fuller – see e. g., R.S. Summers, L.L. Fuller, 1984. 2 L.L. Fuller, The Law in Quest of Itself, 1940 3 D. Dyzenhaus, Fuller’s Novelty, in: W. J. Witteveen and W. van der Burg (ed.), Rediscovering Fuller. Essays on Implicit Law and Institutional Design, 1999, 78 ARSP Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy Archives de Philosophie du Droit et de Philosophie Sociale Archivo de Filosofía Jurídica y Social ARSP Band 101 • Heft 1 • 2015 © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart