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International legal positivism in some of its radical forms in the 21st century operates as theological voluntarism. It is the ambition to translate an overwhelmingly practical art into a general theory of law that has squeezed these theories into a theological structure of thought. If such a thing could ever exist, a general theory of law ought to reveal the role played by morality in the normative pronouncements about law. However, a general theory can only emerge at the expense of taking the existential decision about identifying law with morality or severing law from morality. Hans Kelsen writes that "law is an order of human behaviours". But is this order founded upon morality or not? This very question articulates a fragmented view of reality falling between fact (morality) and value (law) that we have learned to take for granted.
Practitioners know that the correct professional approach is to be interested in the legal aspects of a case and not in its moral aspects. Moreover, both in theory and practice, one can often limit oneself to act as a morally responsible person. There are, however, several sensitive areas in which even minimal theoretical work calls for the adoption of a moral-normative standpoint. However, the "general theory" type of thinking urges the theological question - will the law punish my immorality or not? The theoretician devising a general theory will lay out the question of morality and law in absolute terms. Independently of the answer, articulating this question involves the assumption that the lawyer should take a theological approach, which is also reflected in the non-neutral outcome of the following two absolutist approaches. If law is to prescribe what is moral, every legal judgment is a moral judgment about good and evil.
