* From Normativity to Responsibility by Raz, Joseph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar) Parenthesized page references in text and notes are to the book.

1. The appropriate thing to do here is probably to cite every book Raz, has written. But to my mind The Authority of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press>, 1986, Practical Reason and Norms, 2d ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) [Raz, , PRN]CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Between Authority and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) stand out as most relevant.

2. For some recent examples see Coleman, Jules L, “The Architecture of Jurisprudence” (2011) 121 YLJ 2 Google Scholar and Shapiro, Scott, Legality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. The claim is of course also closely associated with Raz, who makes it repeatedly in the resources cited in note 2.

3. Hart, HLA, Essays on Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) at 253–54 Google Scholar.

4. Coleman, supra note 2 at 78.

5. In part because as Raz notes in a different context, the law cannot be conceptually confused. See Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law, supra note 1 at 28-33.

6. Arthur Ripstein makes a similar point about how remedial obligations in law are a species of a broader genus when he says, “The idea that how things should be is not changed by any event that should not have happened sounds puzzling, but it is actually familiar from other contexts. Suppose you make a mistake adding a column of figures; the correct sum is not changed by the fact that you wrote down the wrong one. I copy a quotation down incorrectly, and the correct quotation remains correct, no matter how many further copies are made of my mistaken transcription.” See Ripstein, Arthur, “As If It Never Happened” (2007) 48 Wm & Mary L Rev 1957 at 1979Google Scholar.

7. For a recent treatment see Gardner, John, “What is Tort Law For? Part I—The Place of Corrective Justice” (2011) 30 Law & Phil 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jules Coleman’s early views (see, e.g., Coleman, Jules L, Risks and Wrongs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar) about corrective justice sometimes seem to depict corrective justice as an “independent principle” of compensation, in contrast with Ernest Weinrib’s views (see Weinrib, Ernest J, The Idea of Private Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, which seem to see corrective justice as more consistent with the continuity principle.

8. Three issues stand out: (1) the continuity principle tells us nothing about what the “next best” thing is, and therefore what in the way of remedy might be required; moreover, the continuity principle leaves open (2) the possibility that extraneous considerations might “undercut the argument” for a remedy and conversely (3) the possibility that, in addition to the continuity principle, there might be other “independent dut[ies] of compensation” (191), although his argument for this latter point seems overinclusive, relying as it does on the existence of “damages for suffering” which probably can be justified on continuity-thesis-like grounds (as I argue in Essert, Christopher, “Tort Law and Happiness” (2010) 36 Queen’s LJ 1 Google Scholar).

9. Scanlon, TM, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) at 17 Google Scholar.

9. See, e.g., Coleman, Jules L, The Practice of Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) at 71–72 Google Scholar.

11. Reasons are “like the Michelin guide” to Paris: all they ask of us, in some sense, is that we perform the actions that they favour, not that we follow them in so doing. Raz, PRN, supra note 1 at 179.

12. Changing the terms of his earlier distinction between conformity and compliance (on which see Raz, PRN, supra note 1 at 178-82), Raz now (195) uses both ‘conformity’ and ‘compliance’ to refer to what he used to use just ‘conformity’ for; he now uses ‘following’ to refer to what he used to call ‘compliance.’ I will follow the new usage here.

13. For good discussion see Darwall, Stephen, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) at 66 Google Scholar; Heironymi, Pamela, “The Wrong Kind of Reason” (2005) 102 J Phil 435 Google Scholar.

14. Raz seems to hedge this point and says that considerations like the gangster’s threat are “nonstandard reasons”: “Non-standard reasons for an action or an attitude are such that one can conform to them, but not follow them directly (and the impossibility is conceptual or metaphysical, not a matter of psychological difficulty” (40). I am not sure how to read Raz on these non-standard reasons; it seems to me that by failing to meet the test of the nexus non-standard reasons’ non-standardness must lie in the fact that they are not reasons at all.

15. Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46, s 19.

16. R v Molis, [1980] 2 SCR 356.

17. Fuller puts the point by saying “to command what cannot be done is not to make law; it is to unmake law.” Fuller, Lon L, The Morality of Law, rev ed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965) at 37.Google Scholar As we shall see, however, it is far from clear that there is anything particularly legal at play here.

18. This conclusion is similar to the one reached by Scott Shapiro in his Legality, supra note 2 at 392-98.

19. Not surprisingly, this conclusion is consistent with Raz’s own famous treatment of the rule of law in Raz, The Authority of Law, supra note 1 at 210-32.

20. The structure of my argument here—suggesting that exclusionary reasons fail a test for qualifying as a reason set by Raz himself—parallels that of Owens, David, “Rationalism about Obligation” (2008) 16 Eur J Phil 403 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The difference is that the test Owens uses—that a reason must be weighable against other reasons—seems less plausible as a general claim about reasons than does the nexus, as Raz now seems to suggest in saying that some reasons are “such that there cannot be any reasons that conflict with them” (22).

21. See note 12, supra and accompanying text.

22. Raz, PRN, supra note 1 at 190.

23. There is one other kind of case, exemplified by the example of the investment opportunity about which you must decide when you are very tired (see Raz, PRN, supra note 1 at 190-94). This case does not display the pattern of a reason not to {φ because of p} as clearly. In fact this case is probably better explained as a case where you have a reason not to deliberate at all. Unfortunately I do not have the room to go into it in detail here.

24. For more as well as a worry about what else it might exclude see Essert, Christopher, “A Dilemma for Protected Reasons” (2012) 31 Law & Phil 49 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Raz, PRN, supra note 1 at 45.

26. If you are having a hard time with that assumption, presumably you can imagine another consideration which seems to count in favour of awarding the prize to your friend over the other applicants (perhaps your friendship?) but which might be excluded by the rules of the Committee. Nothing about the argument here turns on the facts of the example, of course.

27. Raz, PRN, supra note 1 at 185.

28. Scanlon, TM, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) at 60.Google Scholar

29. This is what some reviews of Scanlon’s book do. See, e.g., the review by Hills, Alison ((2009) 199 Ethics 792 at 793-94CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Another excellent discussion can be found in Kolodny, Niko, “Scanlon’s Investigation: The Relevance of Intent to Permissibility” (2011) 52 Analytic Philosophy 100 at 103-07CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Perhaps because you promised a second friend never to believe anything the first friend told you.

31. Looking at my watch I form the belief that it is now 3:00; remembering that the clocks were changed last night I abandon that belief and form the belief that it is now 4:00.

32. Perhaps as I have presented World Cup here it understates the degree of control that we do have over our beliefs. We have what you might call indirect control over our beliefs, because we can take actions that might lead us to have certain beliefs. Indeed, sometimes we can even respond to what Raz calls “non-standard” (36) or “non-truth-related” (39) reasons (which are generally what I above called the “wrong kinds of reasons”) for some belief. If someone offers me an incentive to believe that the closed window in my office is open, I cannot just make myself believe it to be open. But I can open it and the belief will follow. (See Hieronymi, Pamela, “Controlling Attitudes” (2006) 87 Pacific Phil Q 45 at 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) I can also decide to investigate facts, consult other sources of evidence, and so on, in order to convince myself of the truth of some proposition and thus come to believe it. (For more discussion see ibid.) Aside from these indirect cases, “we have little voluntary control over the way our beliefs respond to reasons we think we have,” as Raz says (98).

33. As Raz has emphasized here (133-34) and in the past, pluralism of values suggests that we can often choose what action to take between various permissible options; but the fact that “epistemic reasons are governed by a single concern” (47) means that we have no such choice available for belief. A related contrast might be arise if epistemic akrasia is impossible as Raz at times (42) seems to suggest.

34. Kavka, Gregory S, “The Toxin Puzzle” (1983) 43 Analysis 33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. For discussion of the relationship between the toxin puzzle and the control we have or lack over our beliefs and intentions see Hieronymi, supra note 32.

36. Kolodny, supra note 29 at 105. Kolodny takes the basic idea of the argument from Hills, supra note 29. Both Hills and Kolodny are concerned to address Scanlon’s argument that, because we cannot choose our reasons, the intention with which we act is not something that is relevant to the permissibility of our actions (and so the Doctrine of Double Effect is mistaken). These concerns are extraneous to my arguments here of course.

37. Which is in fact how Hills at least intends the conditional intentions to be understood. See Hills, ibid. On Bratman’s theory generally see Bratman, Michael, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) [Bratman, “IPPR“]Google Scholar.

38. Bratman, Michael, Structures of Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) at 285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid at 295.

41. There are parallels here with the account of obligation and rule-following offered by Scott Shapiro in, e.g., Shapiro, Scott, “Judicial Can’t” (2001) 11 Phil Issues 530 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Remember that reasons are connected to value—”Reasons for action are such reasons by being facts that establish that the action has some value” (211)—and the mere imposition of a legal obligation or a rule like the Committee’s rule in Prize cannot actually change the value of the action in question.

43. See the discussion in Bratman, IPPR, supra note 37 at 45-46. This is also consistent with the way that Raz seems to want to understand the apparent conflict between what are sometimes called the subjective and objective senses of ‘ought’: Raz argues (108-09) that there is no “ought of rationality,” but rather that subjective normativity is explained by the idea that “if one believes that [I would say “takes”] one’s best reason is to φ then failing to φ may be (depending on additional conditions) irrational.”A similar argument is made in Kolodny, Niko, “Why Be Rational?” (2005) 114 Mind 509 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which Raz cites with approval at 109. There is more discussion of related issues by Raz at 150ff.

44. On which see Raz, PRN, supra note 1 at 170ff; Shapiro, Legality, supra note 2 at 185-88 at passim; and Coleman, supra note 2 at 21-28.