Rule is a dual character concept

Abstract

Recent experimental work revealed that rule violation judgments are sensitive to morality. For instance: when someone blamelessly violates a rule's text, about half of the participants say that the rule was violated, with the remainder saying that it wasn't. Why is that so? Current evidence is compatible with three distinct explanations. According to the pragmatic view, rule violation judgments pragmatically imply judgments of blame. Hence, the results don't tell us anything about the concept of rule itself. Instead, they are simply caused by conversational pragmatics. On the other hand, the mixed character view states that the concept of rule simultaneously combines text and purpose into a single criterion. Finally, the dual character view states that the concept of rule is similar to the concepts of scientist and father. These concepts have two distinct sets of criteria, each sufficient to determine one sense in which the concept applies. One of the criteria is descriptive, while the other is normative. In this paper, we report the results of four studies designed to adjudicate between these alternatives. Studies 1A and 1B find results that are incompatible with the pragmatic view, while Study 2 shows that the concept of rule behaves in a way that is notably different than some mixed character concepts on a linguistic test. Finally, Studies 3–5 support the idea that the concept of rule has a dual character. We consider the jurisprudential implications of each alternative.