 Positivism is however sometimes more credibly associated with the idea that legal philosophy is or should be value-neutral. Kelsen, for example, says, “the function of the science of law is not the evaluation of its subject, but its value-free description” (1960 [1967: 68]) and Hart at one point described his work as “descriptive sociology” (1961 [2012: v]). But a description of what? “Law” is an anthropocentric subject, dependent not merely on our sensory embodiment but also, as its necessary connections to morality show, on our moral sense and capacities. Legal kinds such as courts, decisions, and rules will not appear in a purely physical description of the universe and may not even appear in every social description. (This may limit the prospects for a “naturalized” jurisprudence; though for a defense of the contrary view, see Leiter 1997). Legal positivism, to be sure, is not an “evaluation of its subject”, i.e., an evaluation of the law. And to say that the existence of law depends on social facts does not commit one to thinking that it is a good thing that this is so (nor does it preclude it: see MacCormick 1985 and Campbell 1996). But it does not follow that legal philosophy therefore offers a “value-free description” of its subject. There is a sense, of course, in which every description is value-laden. It selects and systematizes only a subset of the infinite number of facts about its subject. To describe law as resting on customary social rules is to omit many other truths about it including, for example, truths about its connection to the demand for paper or silk. What forms the warrant for our prioritizing the former over the latter? Finnis (1980 [2011: 3–19]) thinks that the only possibility here has to do with the moral reasons we might have for wanting law (that we answer “what?” by answering “why?”) and that the failure of methodological positivism, the failure to achieve a value-free description of the subject, results in the failure of legal positivism. But the question of social significance is not exhausted by our moral register, and especially not only by its positive valence (on which see Dickson 2001). Others point to the notion of conceptual or metaphysical truth as setting the bounds of the question that positivism seeks to answer (for discussion see Raz 2004b). But however these difficult issues are to be resolved, we should not expect legal positivism itself to contribute much. A thesis about the nature of law is not at the same time a thesis about how to understand the nature of law.