Reasons, Respect, and the Law

A philosophical account of how we engage our practical reasoning with law and other complex social practices.

This is a book about law and its impact on our practical reasoning.

Drawing on the work of Bernard Williams, the book argues that our practical engagements with the law are complex and often obscure. It begins with a novel view on practical reason that is called open-minded reasons internalism. This is a view that emphasises how certain considerations can bear on action for concrete agents, and in doing so it is an explanatory account of reasons and actions. The account is receptive to the considerations that makes much of peoples’ lives: the motivations and dispositions they have, the notions of character and identity, and respect.

The book explains that this account helps in making sense of much of the richness seen in real life in how concrete agents engage with the law. It provides the tools to explain when and why an agent identifies herself totally with the law, as Inspector Javert did in Les Misérables, but it can also explain the attitude of respect that many law-abiding citizens have, and even the merely prudential considerations of OW Holmes’ famous ‘bad man’. What emerges from this book is a view on law and practical reason that takes seriously the phenomenology of action.

This book will be of particular importance to anyone interested in philosophical accounts of how we engage our practical reasoning with complex social practices.