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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Varieties of Normativity: an Essay On Social Ontology IV.

On Soft Normativity We wish to refer back to the notion of ‘soft’ normativity we introduced above, and suggest that it is an accurate corollary to Searle’s (and Hart’s and Rawls’) views that they characterize the normativity of social institutions as soft - of a piece with the normativity we find in games.[^33] The constitutive-rules-based ‘oughts’ of games are, however, defeasible to a very high degree.

Certainly when playing baseball one ought to go to first base after four bad pitches are thrown, but no one ought (in any interesting sense) to play baseball in the first place: any baseball player can walk off the field, can abandon the game, any time he wishes - though of course if a professional baseball player were to do this, he would probably lose his job. This last remark reminds us that there are other types of oughts in games, in addition to those based in constitutive rules.

For example: one ought to remain in the baseball field even after humiliating oneself by missing an easy catch. Players in a game of basketball can ‘foul’ their opponents several times in order to prevent them from scoring, but they ought not to stab or shoot their opponents.

One might try to explain the latter sorts of normativity by appealing to the fact that, for example, by embarking on a game of baseball one has in a sense promised not to leave the playing field after making silly mistakes, or that all human beings have in a sense promised not to kill in general and this promise covers also one’s behavior when playing basketball. This strategy, however, robs terms like ‘promise’ and ‘contract’ of their customary meanings.

Moreover, at least some of the mentioned obligations seem not to be obligations of the osrt which one could acquire by means of promises or contracts. Legal and sociopolitical institutions, similarly, give rise to obligations not only of the constitutive-rule-based sort but also of other sorts. According to Hart, for example, Nazi laws are genuine laws in the constitutive-rule-based sense - but they are at the same time laws that one should not follow .