1. Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (1979), at 30. For more general comments to the same effect, see id. at 3–36, 233–249. See also Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms (2d ed. 1999), at 155, “legal rules are norms (i.e., reasons for action)”; and id. at 49–84, 149–199; Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (1986), at 23–69; and Joseph Raz, Between Authority and Interpretation (2010), at 126–165, 203–219.

2. Raz, Between Authority, supra note 1, at 7.

3. Jules Coleman, The Practice of Principle (2001), at 71, italics in the original.

4. Coleman, Jules, The Architecture of Jurisprudence 120 Yale L.J. 1 (2011)Google Scholar, at 78. Other legal rationalists include Andrei Marmor (see Marmor, Andrei, An Instititutional Conception of Authority, 39 Phil. & Pub. Aff. 238 (2011)Google Scholar); and John Gardner (see Gardner, John, What Is Tort Law For? Part I—The Place of Corrective Justice, 30 Law & Phil. 1 (2011)Google Scholar). “Legal rationalist” might be too broad a name for the view I plan to critize since it might seem to cover anyone who holds the view that the law's normativity is to be explained in terms of the law's effect on the reasons of its subjects (and that includes me). A more accurate name might therefore be something like “theorist of legal reason-giving.” But that's too much of a mouthful so, having flagged the point, I am sticking with “legal rationalist” to save words.

5. Coleman, Jules, Incorporationism, Conventionality, and the Practical Difference Thesis, 4 Legal Theory 381 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 383. Closely related to Coleman's practical difference thesis is (the rebuttal of) Raz's no difference thesis as discussed in Raz, Morality, supra note 1, at 48–53.

6. For example: “The fundamental objection is that the predictive interpretation obscures the fact that, where rules exist, deviations from them are not merely grounds for a prediction that hostile reactions will follow or that a court will apply sanctions to those who break them, but are also a reason or justification for such reaction and for applying the sanctions.” See H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (2d ed. 1994), at 84.

7. Joseph Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (2011), at 11.

8. Id. at 70. I say more about the relationship between explanatory and normative reasons below in Section IV.

9. In a way this is just a more precise restatement of Hart's claim in note 6supra: the fact that the confused man takes the law as a (motivating) reason suggests (although it does not prove) that the law gives (normative) reasons.

10. “Every legal system claims authority”; Raz, Authority, supra note 1, at v.

11. Marmor, supra note 4, at 238.

12. Gardner, supra note 4, at 31 (footnote omitted).

13. Coleman, Architecture, supra note 4, at 18.

14. Id. at 71.

15. The idea is most closely associated with Raz; see, e.g., Raz, Authority, supra note 1, at v. But it is widely accepted by many prominent legal philosophers; see, e.g., Coleman, Architecture, supra note 4; Scott Shapiro, Legality (2011); Gardner, John, How Law Claims, What Law Claims, in Institutionalized Reason: The Jurisprudence of Robert Alexy 29 (Klatt, Matthias ed., 2012)Google Scholar.

16. For this interpretation of the idea that the law makes normative claims, see Gardner, How Law Claims, supra note 15. See also Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain (1994), at 215: “The claims that law makes for itself are evident from the language it adopts and from the opinions expressed by its spokesmen,” a passage cited in Gardner, How Law Claims, supra note 15.

17. So that means that my arguments against OAR are not directly about any fundamental questions about the nature of law—what law is, whether it can be a legitimate authority, when (if ever) legal obligations are genuine (perhaps moral) obligations, or what have you. But the arguments in what follows aim to clarify some of the normative structure implicated by such fundamental questions and so (I hope) make those questions easier to answer.

18. Shapiro, supra note 15, at 184–188.

19. Shapiro explicitly ties the idea of the legal point of view and the idea of the law's claim together in id. at 279–280, where he says, “The legal point of view purports to represent the moral point of view.” To similar effect, see Gardner, How Law Claims, supra note 15 (“when, according to law, there are obligations and rights and so on, law's claim is that these are moral obligations and rights and so on, not merely legal ones.”); and (perhaps) Coleman, Jules, Beyond the Separability Thesis: Moral Semantics and the Methodology of Jurisprudence, 27 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 581 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 596–597.

20. That is, in order to understand the law's claim to obligate its subjects, we can hold the claim up to the best theory of obligation we have (a theory we construct by trying to provide the best account possible of some set of intuitions or platitudes or truisms about obligation; see Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (1994); Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (2000); Shapiro, supra note 15); and see whether the law could claim to be doing something that is consistent with that theory.

21. See, e.g., Green, Leslie, Obligation, in The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law 514 (Coleman, Jules & Shapiro, Scott eds., 2002)Google Scholar, at 516: “to have an obligation is to have a reason to act or to refrain from acting.”

22. Obligation is also generally thought to be categorical such that an agent's being obligated to ϕ does not depend on her own projects or goals (see Raz, Joseph, Promises and Obligations, in Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of H.L.A. Hart 210 (Raz, Joseph and Hacker, P.M.S. eds., 1977)Google Scholar); this does not concern us here. Raz's theory of obligation, according to which the fact that A is obligated to ϕ is a categorical protected reason for A to ϕ (see id.), is the most prominent theory in the legal literature and one that does a very good job of accounting for the platitudes about obligation that I mention. Of course, I think Raz's account fails because, among other reasons, it is commited to OAR. The next most prominent theory of obligation, the sanction theory, fares even worse than Raz's as a general account for the reasons famously set out in Hart, supra note 6; see also Hacker, P.M.S., Sanction Theories of Duty, in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, 2d Ser. 131 (Simpson, A.W.B. ed., 1973)Google Scholar. For an excellent discussion of these theories as well as of obligation more generally, see Owens, David, Rationalism about Obligation, 16 Eur. J. Phil. 403 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. The theory of legal obligation gestured toward in Greenberg, Mark, The Standard Picture and Its Discontents, in 1 Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law 39 (Green, Leslie & Leiter, Brian eds., 2011)Google Scholar, is importantly distinct from the theories discussed in the previous note. Unfortunately I do not have the space here to consider the relationship between that theory and OAR or my arguments against it.

24. In light of that, note the following difference between the argument in Section II and the argument in Section III. The argument in Section II relies on what might be more general features of obligation rather than on any special features of legal obligation (where “legal” is understood adjectivally), which means that it might apply not just to legal obligation but to obligation in general. On the other hand, the argument in Section III, relying as it does on special features of legal (again, understood adjectivally) obligation, has an explicitly narrower scope: it applies only to those sorts of obligation that exist as a result of the same sorts of deliberations as do legal obligations. However, for the purposes of this article I restrict the arguments in Section II to the legal context as well; I do not have space to explore the broader question.

25. This is a common view among legal rationalists. See, e.g., Gardner, What Is Tort Law For? supra note 4, at 31: “An obligation is not a reason, but the fact that one has an obligation is a reason.” Raz, Practical Reason, supra note 1, at 51, makes the same point regarding rules: “Since rules are objects and only facts are reasons rules are not, strictly speaking, reasons. The fact that there is a rule that p is a reason and not the rule that p itself. For brevity I shall, however, refer to rules as reasons.”

26. For good arguments to this effect, see Mark Schroeder, Slaves of the Passions (2007), at 20–21; and Gardner, John & Macklem, Timothy, Reasons, in The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law 440 (Coleman, Jules & Shapiro, Scott eds., 2002)Google Scholar.

27. As David Plunkett pointed out to me in the course of a very helpful discussion of these issues, there are enough moving parts in metaethics and metanormative theory that one could argue for a view according to which obligations are facts (and so could be reasons). But I am just going to assume that reasons are facts but obligations are not because (i) I suspect that any plausible version of such a view will have a hard time accounting for the features of obligation that I mentioned in the third clarificatory point, and (ii), as I mention in note 25, supra, most legal rationalists seem to think reasons are facts but obligations are not.

28. Schroeder, supra note 26, at 21.

29. As argued in H.L.A. Hart, Essays on Bentham (1982), at 253–254.

30. Do not be thrown off here by the fact that a “verdict” in law normally expresses a theoretical conclusion (i.e., “guilty” or “not guilty,” from which some practical consequences typically flow). Here the verdict that one ought (or ought not) to ϕ is meant to be a practical verdict. It is not the verdict that it would be good or right or just to ϕ but the verdict that one ought not to do it.

31. The term “verdictive” as I'm using it here was introduced originally by Philipa Foot; see Philipa Foot, Virtues and Vices (2003), at 181. Foot, and Philip Stratton-Lake following her (see Philip Stratton-Lake, Kant, Duty, and Moral Worth (2000), at 14), contrast the verdictive with the evidential. But as Jonathan Dancy, Ethics Without Principles (2004), at 16, notes, this seems not quite right, since the contrast is not between verdicts and considerations that suggest that we ought to believe that the verdict is correct, but rather between verdicts and the considerations that actually go toward making the verdict true. (That is, contributory considerations ground verdictive considerations metaphysically, not epistemically.) For what it's worth, note also that this is a different sense of “verdictive” from that employed in J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1955).

32. I realize that there are reasons to doubt that this is quite right. But I am trying to phrase this claim broadly enough that it allows for a few different views on the precise relation between wrongness and reasons. (What I have in mind here is the view that Scanlon seems to suggest in Scanlon, T.M., Wrongness and Reasons: A Re-examination, in II Oxford Studies in Metaethics (Shafer-Landau, Russ ed., 2007)Google Scholar.) So it might be that for something to be wrong is just for the reasons against it to outweigh the reasons for it. Or it might be that there are special sorts of reasons, such as Darwall's second-person reasons, which can be themselves conclusive and can make an action wrong even when there are otherwise good reasons to perform it. See Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint (2006). But even there it makes sense to say that the second-personal reasons defeat the other reasons.

33. Dancy, Jonathan, Should We Pass the Buck?, 47 Royal Inst. Phil. Supp. 159 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 166. The bracketed word “wrongess” actually replaces “rightness” in the original, but the following sentence (“And the same is true of wrongness”) ensures that this is not a problem. Dancy's title is a reason for me to indicate that there are parallels between the argument I am making here and the claim that (moral) wrongness is what is called a buck-passing notion. For discussion of that claim, see Scanlon, supra note 32; as well as Darwall, Stephen, But It Would Be Wrong, 27 Soc. Phil. & Pol'y 135 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 138.

34. Shelvin-Carpenter Company v. State of Minnesota, 218 U.S. 57 (1910).

35. Allen v. Flood, [1898] A.C. 1, 96 (H.L.).

36. Gardner, John, Wrongs and Faults, 59 Rev. Metaphysics 95 (2005)Google Scholar, might be seen to give reason to doubt this argument on the grounds that “wrong” sometimes means “in breach of an obligation” but other times means “unjustified” (in the sense of not supported by the best reasons). So, Gardner says, the defendant ship captain in Vincent v. Lake Erie, 109 Minn. 456 (1910), was wrong to keep his ship tied to the plaintiff's dock because he was trespassing but not wrong to do so because to allow his ship to float free would certainly have caused significant damage and so keeping it fast was certainly justified. There is really a ton to say about this point and how I think it needs to be addressed, but I do not have room here. At this point, all I can offer is that the second sense of “wrong,” that Gardner is after is, at least in cases like Vincent, extralegal. That is, while the captain might have been morally or prudentially justified in keeping his ship fast, he was legally wrong to do so exactly because he had a legal obligation not to.

37. Here you might object that legal obligations can conflict with one another. For what it is worth, I am not sure that is true (it depends, I think, on some questions about how obligations are individuated that we do not have the space to get into here). But if you do take that view, you probably also accept that there is some sense of “what you are, all things considered, legally obligated to do,” which is determined by something like taking all of the relevant legal obligations into account and deciding which one outweighs the others. That is the notion that I think of when I think of legal obligation—I think that is also the notion that Hart is thinking of when he says that legal directives create peremptory reasons—and that is the notion that is verdictive.

38. These, recall from Raz, Morality, supra note 1, are the reasons that the obligation was meant to be based on, not the reasons it was actually based on.

39. I am leaving this vague intentionally: just how the law goes about deciding, based on the reasons to ϕ and not to ϕ, that there is a legal obligation to ϕ is not something I have space to account for here.

40. Putting the point this way might still be too strong. That some property is verdictive is compatible with the thought that the property's obtaining can be a reason, just not a reason of the sort that the verdict is based on. So, that an action is wrong is not, if wrongness is verdictive, a reason not to perform it. But it might be a reason of some other sort, perhaps a reason to deliberate about whether to perform it in some special way. I take it this is consistent with the suggestion made in Vanessa Carbonell, Dicto, DeDesires and Morality as a Fetish, Phil. Stud. (2011), doi 10.1007/s11098–011-9825-zGoogle Scholar. I say more about this idea below.

41. Raz seems at times to have recognized some aspects of the problem of the reason-giving force of legal obligation. Raz of course argues that the fact that A has a legal obligation to ϕ is a (protected) reason for A to ϕ. He is committed to the dependence thesis, according to which authoritative directives “should be based . . . on reasons which apply to the subjects of those directives”; see Raz, Ethics, supra note 16, at 214. But if this is so, Raz notes, we open ourselves to the problematic possibility of double-counting of reasons (as he says in Raz, Morality, supra note 1, at 58), since if we add the directive, which is based on the dependent reasons, to the balance of reasons that already contains those dependent reasons, we appear to be counting some reasons twice. This parallels a problem Dancy raises when he says that if a verdict were allowed to count as a reason for itself, “we would be forced to reconsider the balance of reasons once we had asserted [the verdict] in a way which would continue ad infinitum. Which is ridiculous”; see Jonathan Dancy, Ethics without Principles (2004), at 40. For more on this point and its implications for Raz's view of legal obligation, see Essert, Christopher, A Dilemma for Protected Reasons, 31 Law & Phil. 49 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Here you might reasonably object, No they are not! What about customary rules, for example? I think that is a fair point, but as far as I can tell, it is not a problem for me but a problem for the legal rationalist. It seems to me that the idea that that law claims to give reasons for action already presupposes that most laws are directives intentionally given as laws and that other cases such as customary laws are to be explained in derivative ways. My argument here challenges the idea that the law claims to give reasons on its home turf, as it were. The other cases are therefore not a problem for me. In any case, while the underlying assumption of argument I make in this section might not apply to customary rules, the argument of the last section still applies since it rests on no such assumption but rather on the features of obligation more generally.

43. The main arguments that I rely on are found in Michael Bratman, Intention, Plans, and PracticalReason (1987). Clarifications and additions can be found in Bratman, Faces of Intention (1999); and Bratman, Structures ofAgency (2007).

44. Kolodny, Niko, Aims as Reasons, in Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T.M. Scanlon 43 (Freeman, Samuel, Kumar, Rahul, & Wallace, R. Jay eds., 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 50–53, emphasizes this point.

45. Bratman, Intention, Plans, supra note 43, at 24.

46. Id. at 24–27 contains the full argument.

47. I do not have the space to get into this here but if the arguments in Shapiro, Legality, supra note 15, are correct, this is more than an analogy. According to Shapiro, both laws and intentions are Bratmanian plans, and so the story about impermissible bootstrapping that prevents us from seeing intentions as reasons must apply to the law equally.

48. One might doubt that this is true, on the grounds that the law is corrupt or evil or incompetent. But from the legal point of view—the point of view, remember, from which the law is supposed to give us reasons—it most certainly holds true. The law must represent itself as giving us legal obligations that make sense and come from somewhere.

49. Or, again, at least it claims to do so.

50. And the fact that it was not—as the well-known objections in G.J. Warnock, The Object of Morality (1971), suggest—was its major flaw.

51. Another objection or response to my argument can be found in Raz's own account. Above I mention the problem of double-counting that arises when a legal obligation, based on some underlying dependent reasons to ϕ, is seen as a (protected) reason to ϕ. To avoid double-counting, Raz offers a different view in which the legal directive excludes all the reasons that were considered in its formation. Here, the directive is not a new reason to ϕ but rather “sums up” all the other reasons. If this is a plausible view, it might be able to avoid the problem of bootstrapping by sidestepping the problematic claim that a new reason is created, as the legal reason is not, on this view, really a new reason but rather a summation of some already existing reasons. Unfortunately, this view fails too: by excluding all of the reasons including those that count in favour of ϕing, Raz makes it the case that it is not permissible or acceptable for citizens to ϕ for those very reasons that the law relied on in issuing the directive. But that is just implausible. As Raz himself notes: “It is a truism that the law accepts conformity for other reasons (convenience, prudence, etc.)”; Raz, Authority, supra note 1, at 30. So this objection fails, too. For more on this point, see Essert, Dilemma, supra note 41.

52. Bratman talks in terms of “framing reasons.” See Bratman, Intention, Plans, supra note 43. The Razian idea of exclusionary reasons gets at the same basic point: see the argument at the end of Section IV.

53. See Bratman, Intention, Plans, supra note 43. See also Bratman, Structures, supra note 43, esp. ch. 13. A different take, which I think reaches the same type of conclusion but from a different starting point, is Niko Kolodny's. See, e.g., Kolodny, Niko, Why Be Rational? 114 Mind 509 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kolodny, Niko, How Does Coherence Matter?, 107 Proc. Aristotelian Soc'y 229 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54. In the normal case, that is. Of course there might be cases where our deliberations can have an effect on the reasons that we have, say, because we tend to do a better job of carrying out certain tasks if we have thought about them in a particular way, or some such thing. But those reasons are merely derivative (in the sense I elaborate below in Section V) and are not going to do the sort of work that the legal rationalist needs.

55. Of course, these are not the only arguments for the conclusion that the law does not claim to give reason. Two other prominent arguments take as their primary target Raz's claim that the fact that A is under a legal obligation to ϕ is a first-order reason to ϕ, protected by a second-order exclusionary reason that counts against complying with some other reasons not to ϕ. Donald Regan argues that the fact that A is legally obligated to ϕ is better seen not as an actual reason to ϕ but as an “indicator” reason, which is, roughly, a reason to believe that the balance of reasons favors ϕing. See Donald Regan, Authority and Value: Reflections on Raz's Morality of Freedom, 62 S.C. L. Rev. 995 (1988–1989); and Donald Regan, Reasons, Authority and the Meaning of “Obey”: Further Thoughts on Raz and Obedience to Law, 3 Can. J.L. & Juris. 3 (1990). Larry Alexander argues that the law affects our practical reasoning primarily “through its effect on people's likely behaviour,” which is a form of reason-giving through triggering. See Larry Alexander, Law and Exclusionary Reasons, 18 Phil. Topics 5 (1990). I do not have space here to address these arguments to the extent that they deserve. Very briefly, however, Regan's argument is problematic because it seems to require that when A is under a legal obligation to ϕ, A has a reason to believe that he ought to ϕ. But I do not see why this is required—all that is required of A is that he ϕ. Alexander's argument fails, I think, because it denies the peremptory nature of legal obligation: he is right to point to the importance of the sorts of triggering considerations that he does, but he has no way to explain how these considerations can close the question of how to act in the way that legal obligation does. I do not have the space to consider either of these interesting accounts here; note, however, that their arguments are different from and independent of mine.

56. For an example, see Raz, Morality, supra note 1, at 48–53.

57. For general discussion of the difference, see Gardner & Macklem, supra note 26; or Coleman, Practice, supra note 3, at 71–72. For some different views about the nature of the differences between normative and explanatory reasons, compare Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (1994), at 94–98 (arguing that the two types of reasons are different sorts of metaphysical entities: normative reasons are truths about the justifiability of actions, whereas explanatory reasons are psychological states of agents); and Jonathan Dancy, Practical Reality (2000), at 98–137 (arguing that normative and explanatory reasons are the same type of thing). See also T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (1998), at 33–55; and Raz, From Normativity, supra note 7, passim. I should also note, to make things even more complicated, that some philosophers divide what I call “explanatory reasons” further, into a broader class of explanatory reasons and a smaller class of “motivating reasons,” where, roughly, “explanatory reasons” can include facts that explain things having nothing to do with any agent or action (the high-pressure system was the reason for the sunny weather) and “motivating reasons” are limited to explanations of the intentional actions of agents.

58. As I say, this is widely accepted; it is not universally accepted. Joseph Raz offers a prominent defense of this idea, calling it the normative/explanatory nexus, see Raz, From Normativity, supra note 7, at 70 and passim ; for discussion of Raz's view, see Essert, Christopher, From Raz's Nexus to Legal Normativity, 25 Can. J.L. & Juris. 465 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The idea is most famously associated with Bernard Williams's defense of internalism about reasons in his essay “Internal and External Reasons.” See Williams, Bernard, Internal and External Reasons, in Moral Luck 101–113 (1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A similar idea is defended in Schroeder, supra note 26, at 10–15.

59. A point clearly spelled out in Gardner & Macklem, Reasons, supra note 26.

60. See, on sanctions, Hart, Concept, supra note 6; on conventions, Green, Leslie, Positivism and Conventionalism, 19 Can. J.L. & Juris. 35 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and on fairness, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971).

61. The basic idea here comes from Enoch and the discussion of triggering in the really brilliant Enoch, David, Reason-Giving and the Law, in 1Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law 1 (Green, Leslie & Leiter, Brian eds., 2011)Google Scholar. I borrow the title “derivative” from Niko Kolodny, who uses it for a related idea in a different context. See Kolodny, Niko, Scanlon's Investigation: The Relevance of Intent to Permissibility, 52 Analytic Phil. 100 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 101.

62. As Coleman puts it in Coleman, Jules, Beyond Inclusive Positivism, 22 Ratio Juris 359 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 390.

63. Raz says that the reasons given by sanctions are reasons of the wrong kind to explain law's normativity. See Raz, Practical, supra note 1, at 161.

64. First made in Hart, Essays on Bentham, supra note 29.

65. See, e.g., Green, Leslie, Legal Obligation and Authority, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Zalta, Edward N. ed., 2010)Google Scholar, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/legal-obligation/; Gardner, John, Legal Positivism: 5 ½ Myths, 48 Am. J. Juris. 199 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 207–209; Shapiro, Authority, in The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law 383 (Jules Coleman & Scott Shapiro eds., 2002), at 389; Markwick, P., Independent of Content, 9 Legal Theory 43 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sciaraffa, Stefan, On Content-Independent Reasons: It's Not in the Name, 28 Law & Phil. 233 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66. Well, maybe not entirely: I think that both Sciaraffa and Gardner are onto something in their focus not on the nature of the action in question but rather on the distinction between, as Gardner puts it, the source and the merits of the norm (see Gardner, Legal Positivism, supra note 65, at 209). Notably, both Gardner and Sciaraffa suggest that one necessary step toward understanding this problem is abandoning Hart's nomenclature (which Gardner says created “confusion” and Sciaraffa calls a “misnomer”; Sciaraffa, supra note 65, at 238).

67. Again, for what it's worth, I think this is the kind of thing people have in mind when they say that they do not perform some actions because they are “illegal.”

68. Cf. the “motivational generalization” discussed in Raz, Practical, supra note 1, at 156.

69. The officials need not actually think this—they could be taking a detached point of view on the matter. On which see id . as well as the discussions in Shapiro, Legality, supra note 18; and Coleman, Architecture, supra note 4.

70. There is a potentially helpful parallel here, I think, with the way that Scanlon, Nagel, and others explain (or explain away) the intuition that our desires are reasons for action. The thought there, as I take it, is that when I say “I ϕ because I wanted to,” I am elliptically referring to some set of reasons on which I based my desire to ϕ. See Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (1970), at 27–32; Scanlon, What We Owe, supra note 57, at 45: “When we say, for example, that a person has a reason to call the travel agent because she wants to go to Chicago, we don't mean merely that she would enjoy Chicago, or that she thinks longingly of it and finds the thought of going there tempting, but rather that she takers herself to have good reason to make the trip.”

71. Scanlon, Wrongness and Reasons, supra note 32, at 7.

72. Id. at 10.

73. Perry, Notably Stephen, Second-Order Reasons, Uncertainty, and Legal Theory, 62 S. Cal. L. Rev. 913 (1988)Google Scholar.

74. The no-normative-difference thesis is related to—it is at least a niece or nephew and maybe a direct descendant of—Raz's no difference thesis as discussed in Raz, Morality, supra note 1, at 48–53, and Coleman's practical difference thesis, discussed in Coleman, Practice, supra note 3; as well as in Coleman, Incorporationism, supra note 5.

75. Coleman, Incorporationism, Conventionality, supra note 5, at 383.

76. Coleman more recently put the point in the following way: “For my part, I think it best to put the point as broadly and generally as possible. Law impacts what we have reason to do.” See Coleman, Architecture, supra note 4, at 78.

77. As argued in Essert, Dilemma, supra note 41.

78. Because even with what I have got here, you might see potential objections, to the effect that even second-order reasons cannot sufficiently explain the idea that law claims to make a normative difference. For an argument that they cannot, see Larry Alexander & Emily Sherwin, The Rule of Rules: Morality, Rules, and the Dilemmas of Law (2007), esp. ch. 4.

79. In part for the reasons offered in Owens, Rationalism, supra note 22; Shapiro, Authority, supra note 65; Essert, From Raz's Nexus, supra note 58.

80. As he says in Coleman, Beyond the Separability Thesis, supra note 19, at 597 n.17.

81. And if it is not, Enoch, supra note 61, should clarify things.

82. See Gardner, What Is Tort Law For? supra note 12; and Weinrib, Ernest, Civil Recourse and Corrective Justice, 39 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 273 (2012)Google Scholar.