Rules, Rights, and Hedges

One is sometimes, but only sometimes, justified in pursuing a suboptimal course of action due to a concern that, in attempting the ideal course, one might fail to follow through and so make the situation even worse. This paper explains why such hedging is sometimes justified and sometimes not. The explanation we offer relies on Elizabeth Anscombe’s distinction between reasons and logoi. Reasons are normative considerations that identify something good or bad that an act will secure or avoid, while logoi constrain which actions one may consider at all. We argue that a careful unpacking of this distinction, in light of Anscombe’s associated notion of natural unintelligibility, explains why hedging is only sometimes justified. First, the intuitively inappropriate cases of hedging all involve treating logoi as though they had the normative bearing of reasons. Second, the action-theoretic differences between reasons and logoi ground a principled explanation of why one may hedge when considering reasons but not when considering logoi. Having made this argument, we then show how our approach to hedging is superior to the two approaches recently developed by Berislav Marušić and Stephen White. First, we show that their accounts give counter-intuitive results in some cases. Second, we argue that their accounts violate a plausible principle of interpersonal parity (i.e., they sometimes allow us to consider the faults of others while precluding us from considering our own faults). Finally, we argue that our account better explains how intuitions shift as we vary the details of cases.