Authority, Law, and Razian Reasons

Abstract

Abstract No chapter could summarize, let alone do justice to, the work of Joseph Raz taken as a whole. The corpus of Raz’s work is simply too diverse in its subject matters, too rich in its insight, and too finely wrought in its detailed analyses for a comprehensive survey. Instead, I shall focus on one pre-supposition central to Raz’s celebrated theories of authority and of law.1 This presupposition has to do with the nature of practical rationality, and more specifically, with the kinds of reasons for action that authoritative legal norms give to rational actors. Raz presupposes that morality gives us ‘exclusionary reasons’ for acting under an authoritative norm. ‘Exclusionary reasons’ are second-order in that they give us reasons to discount other reasons in assessing an action’s rightness.