Plan-Attitudes, Plan-Contents, and Bootstrapping

Abstract

This paper is a critical assessment of Scott Shapiro’s planning theory of law, laid out in his 2011 book Legality. The planning theory could be considered a culmination of some dominant trends in contemporary philosophical thinking about the nature of law. And the problems of the theory identified in this paper are, in the author’s view, symptomatic of those trends. Here, those trends are diagnosed in a way that shows why they lead to the problems identified, while the chapter also addresses some problems specific to the planning theory. Elsewhere, the author has been developing an alternative and, what appears to him to be, better trajectory in legal philosophical thinking shorn of those trends. Although the arguments of this paper are in great measure negative, they are meant to have the positive effect of helping the reader to see why that alternative trajectory is worth developing.