Practical Reason and Norms

In what way are rules normative, and how do they differ from ordinary reasons? What makes normative systems systematic? What distinguishes legal systems, and in what consists their normativity? Joseph Raz answers these three questions by taking reasons as the basic normative concept, and showing the distinctive role reasons have in every case, thus paving the way to a unified account of normativity.

Joseph Raz is Professor of the Philosophy of Law at the University of Oxford and is Visiting Fellow of Jurisprudence at Columbia University in New York.