Practical Rules: When We Need Them and When We Don't

Rules proliferate; some are kept with a bureaucratic stringency bordering on the absurd, while others are manipulated and ignored in ways that injure our sense of justice. Under what conditions should we make exceptions to rules, and when should they be followed despite particular circumstances? The two dominant models in the current literature on rules are the particularist account and that which sees the application of rules as normative. Taking a position that falls between these two extremes, Alan Goldman is the first to provide a systematic framework to clarify when we need to follow rules in our moral, legal, and prudential decisions, and when we ought not to do so.

Rules are all around us. They come in all shapes and sizes: legislative, bureaucratic, administrative, ethical, and religious. We break the rules now and then, but mostly we follow them. "But why?" asks Alan H. Goldman in Practical Rules. He then sets out to clarify why we have rules and why we're sometimes justified in ignoring them. In doing so, he mediates between two extremes, the "particularists," who recognize rules only with respect to circumstances, and genuine rule defenders, like the moral "prescriptivist" R.M. Hare.

Goldman is not just a theoretician concerned with giving an abstract description of rule making and breaking; because he is heavily invested in the everyday consequences of rules, Practical Rules will interest many nonphilosophers. In particular, he devotes nearly a quarter of the book to legal rules and illustrates his arguments with constitutional questions and ethical disagreements that broaden the book's appeal. At the same time he engages today's main thinkers on rules, including Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin, and John Rawls, who add depth and nuance to the arguments. --Eric de Place