The Normative Structure of Request

Abstract

Joseph Raz holds that, whereas a commander in issuing her command intends to impose an obligation on the commandee, a requester in making her request purports to create a pro tanto reason for the requestee through her act of request. Chapter 2 uses a series of examples to develop a set of “formal constraints on the concept of request” and then uses these constraints to argue that Raz’s account of request does justice to neither the relation between requester and requestee nor to that between a requester and her own request. The chapter then marshals elements from Kant’s ethics and Elizabeth Anscombe’s work on testimony in order to articulate an alternative conception of the normative structure of request, one according to which request should be understood in terms of a principle obligating requester and requestee to jointly harmonize their ends.