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Legal Directives and Practical Reasons

Online ISBN:
9780191748226
Print ISBN:
9780199659876
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Legal Directives and Practical Reasons

Noam Gur
Noam Gur
Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary University of London
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Published online:
24 January 2019
Published in print:
22 November 2018
Online ISBN:
9780191748226
Print ISBN:
9780199659876
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book investigates law’s interaction with practical reasons. What difference can legal requirements—be they traffic rules, tax laws, work safety regulations, or others—make to normative reasons relevant to our action? The book critically examines some of the existing answers to that question and puts forward an alternative account. At the outset, two competing positions are pitted against each other: first, the view taken by Joseph Raz, that when the law satisfies certain conditions that endow it with legitimate authority, it acquires pre-emptive force, namely it constitutes reasons for action that exclude and take the place of some other reasons; second, an antithetical position, according to which legal requirements cannot exclude otherwise applicable reasons, but can at most provide us with reasons that operate, and compete with opposing reasons, in terms of their weight. These positions are examined from several perspectives, such as justified disobedience cases, law’s conduct-guiding function, and the phenomenology associated with authority. It is found that, although each of the above positions offers insight into the relation between law and practical reasons, they both suffer from significant flaws. These observations lay the basis on which, in the final part of the book, an alternative position is put forward and defended. On this position, the existence and operation of a reasonably just and well-functioning legal system constitutes some reasons that are neither ordinary reasons for action nor pre-emptive ones, but rather reasons to adopt an (overridable) disposition that inclines its possessor towards compliance with the system’s requirements.

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