A (legitimate) authoritative command provides its subject with a reason for action. Many also think it provides its subject with a peremptory reason to refrain from acting for certain kinds of countervailing reasons. When a father tells his daughter to go to bed, the consideration that she “doesn’t feel like it” is not only insufficiently weighty to challenge her father’s command, but is also a reason that ought to be excluded.
The capacity of commands to exclude competing reasons has received extensive discussion, most famously by Raz (1986). Less has been said of the nature this exclusion. How is the father’s command supposed to impact upon his daughter’s deliberation? What kind of weight does this exclusionary reason carry for its subject?
I propose that a command’s exclusionary force is a property that modulates in robustness. Some commands carry a more robust exclusionary force, in the sense that they continue to be relevant and retain exclusionary force across a wider range of circumstances, while other commands carry a more fragile exclusionary force, relevant over a narrower range of cases. This interpretation helps illuminate how authoritative directives can be both binding and non-absolute.
