checkers). All of this is to say, normative propositions are authoritative only insofar as one intends to participate in activities that are in some sense defined by those propositions. Applied to the law, there are interesting disagreements regarding the way in which the law has normative authority over its subjects. Whereas Austin and Hart grounded the normativity of law in force and social practice respectively, for Dworkin, the force of law lies in the moral justifiability of coercive government action—a law has normative force, just so long as the government would be morally justified in using force to enforce it.12
It should be immediately apparent that while there is reason to think that imperatives and normative propositions, and maybe even rules, differ in significant ways, these categories do not separate cleanly from one another. My own discussion of normative propositions has already lapsed into talk of rules and something similar can be said for some imperatives. After all, CHORES is exactly the type of imperative that I would characterize as a rule, and I certainly understood them in that way as a child. Boghossian writes:
in looking at the literature on rules one is struck by two related observations: one is that different notions are often conflated; the other is that it is often hard to see when a dispute is merely verbal and when it is substantive.13
Regardless of whether the law consists entirely in rules or some combination of rules and other rule-like contents, following the law is not a singular activity that imposes a singular set of demands on an agent. At the risk of putting too fine a point on the matter, the most basic challenge in following the law is the concept of law itself.
A reasonable response at this point is to acknowledge that a lack of philosophical resolution need not always trouble one in practice. For example, despite widespread philosophical disagreement in normative ethics, one can find a surprising amount of agreement about ethics in practice, a point made compellingly by Alasdair MacIntyre some years ago. As it is, most soldiers manage to follow the law
12 Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press 1986, p. 93.
13 Paul A. Boghossian, "Rules, Norms, and Principles," in Problems of Normativity, Rules and Rule-Following, eds. Michał Araszkiewicz, Paweł Banaś, Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki, Krzysztof Płeszka, Cham, CH: Springer Verlag 2015, pp. 3–12, here p. 3.
Consider the following two imperatives, TURING and CHORES:
TURING: If the value is 1, write 0 and move the tape right.
CHORES: If the dishwasher is empty, rinse your dish and place it into the dishwasher.
Both imperatives specify a condition and an action, but the authority of either instruction depends principally on the authority of whomever or whatever is issuing the command. That is to say that whether I ought to obey an imperative depends in significant respects on whether the issuer stands in an appropriate authority relationship to me. In the first case adduced above, the authority is that of a Turing table or a program of some sort. In the second case, it is something like house rules; as my mother used to be fond of saying, "my house, my rules." For CHORES, disobedience may be costly, but for TURING it is not even a possibility.
Normative propositions also specify conditions and action guidance, although the authority of the proposition is grounded more broadly in the system of which it is a part. Still, normative propositions are assertions that either grant a permission or levy a requirement. For example, Boghossian discusses the following two normative propositions (ER 474-5):
OPEN: At the beginning of the game, white must make the first move.
CASTLE: If the board configuration is C, you may castle (make a specialized move involving both the king and one of the rooks).
Obviously, both OPEN and CASTLE are rules of chess, and as such, their normative authority is conditional. If I intend to play chess at all, then I had better abide by OPEN and, if I intend to play well, I had better know when to exercise the permission afforded by CASTLE. John Rawls describes these types of rules as practice rules whereby "practice" refers to
any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure.11
Practice rules are those rules that constitute the practice in a literal sense. If, while purporting to play chess, I move a pawn from square to square, jumping multiple pieces within a single turn, it turns out that I am not really playing chess at all (maybe I mean to be playing
11 John Rawls, "Two Concepts of Rules," The Philosophical Review 64/1 (January 1955), 3-32, here p. 3.
