Following the law because it’ s the law: obedience, bootstrapping, and practical reason Paul Schofield * Department of Philosophy, Bates College, Lewiston, ME, USA (Received 22 December 2016; final version received 27 November 2017) Voluntarists in the early modern period speak of an agent’ s following the law because she was ordered to do so or because it’ s the law. Contemporary philosophers tend either to ignore or to dismiss the possibility of justified obedience of this sort – that is, they ignore or dismiss the possibility that something’ s being the law could in itself constitute a good reason to act. In this paper, I suggest that this view isn’t taken seriously because of certain widespread beliefs about practical reason – in particular, it’ s due to the belief that it’ s impossible for reasons to be “bootstrapped” into existence. I argue, though, that a plausible account of practical reasoning should allow that reasons can be bootstrapped into existence, and so there’ s no reason to be suspicious about the possibility of a person’ s being justified in following the law because it’ s the law. I end by suggesting that this conclusion opens up important new avenues of inquiry for philosophers working on topics related to legal obedience. Keywords: law; obedience; practical reason; bootstrapping 1. Introduction Voluntarists in the early modern period often speak of an agent’ s following the law because she was ordered to do so or because it’ s the law – in contrast to following it for some other reason. Hobbes, for instance, tells us that law takes the form of command, which is “where a man says, ‘Do this’ or ‘Do not this,’ without expecting other reason than the will of him who says it” (Hobbes 1991, 166). Pufendorf similarly characterizes a law as “a decree by which a superior obliges a subject to conform his acts to his own prescription” and says that the normative force of the law “by no means flows from the common condition of human nature, but proceeds from the decision of the lawgiver alone” (Pufendorf 2002, 160–161). And more recently, philosophical anarchist Robert Paul Wolff discusses (albeit skeptically) what looks to be a voluntarist conception of legal obedience, which he says consists not just in “doing what someone tells you to do” but rather in “doing what [someone] tells you to do because he tells you to do it” (Wolff 1998, 9). The volun- tarist thought, then, is this: the fact that the law enjoins an agent to perform an action can in itself constitute a reason for her to perform that action. Contemporary philosophers, even when arguing that we have reason to act according to the law, typically do not claim that the law itself constitutes a reason in the sense specified above. Rather, they employ what might be called a normative buck-passing strategy, which says that following the law can be rational insofar as it enables a person to act on other © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group *Email: pschofie@bates.edu Philosophical Explorations, 2018 Vol. 21, No. 3, 400–411, https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2017.1421686