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As was previously noted with regards to Austin, and will be demonstrated with regards to other authors to be considered throughout this book, a large part of the positivist denial that a rule’s moral permissibility is a necessary condition of its legal validity can be traced to the widely held belief that it is impossible to find an objective and universally applicable test for moral permissibility that all individuals would accept regardless of their subjective beliefs. In formulating the PGC, Gewirth attempts to overcome this problem by grounding his test for the moral permissibility of action in the unavoidable fact of our individual agency. In doing so he identifies a critical morality; one that is mind-independent, and not the contingent collective morality that a given society may extrapolate from its own subjective cultural requirements.4 He suggests that such an abstract principle remains valid in light of its mind-independence by offering the following definition of what features a norm need possess in order to be considered moral in character:

… [A] morality is a set of categorically obligatory requirements for action that are addressed at least in part to every actual or prospective agent, and that are concerned with furthering the interests, especially the most important interests, of persons other than or in addition to the agent or the speaker. The requirements are categorically obligatory in that compliance with them is mandatory for the conduct of every person to whom they are addressed regardless of whether he wants to accept them or their results, and regardless also of the requirements of any other institutions such as law or etiquette, whose obligatoriness may itself be doubtful or variable.5 Of note here is Gewirth’s direct opposition to the claim endorsed by Spaak in the introduction of this chapter: whereas many hold the view that legal norms necessarily override moral norms, Gewirth suggests that a true understanding of the operation of a supreme moral principle would require us to argue the reverse. This section will address the first stage needed to show the correctness of this natural law claim: if we are to prove that moral rules constrain the substantive content of legal rules to directives that are morally permissible, the PGC needs to be shown to be capable acting as a test by which we can ascertain the moral permissibility of all action. It will be shown to be capable of this function, and ought to be accepted as valid.