| Summary: | Prescriptive rules
guide human behavior across various domains of community life, including law,
morality, and etiquette. What, specifically, are rules in the eyes of their
subjects, i.e., those who are expected to abide by them? Over the last sixty
years, theorists in the philosophy of law have offered a useful framework with
which to consider this question. Some, following H. L. A. Hart, argue that a
rule’s text at least sometimes suffices to determine whether the rule itself
covers a case. Others, in the spirit of Lon Fuller, believe that there is no
way to understand a rule without invoking its purpose --- the benevolent ends
which it is meant to advance. In this paper we ask whether people associate
rules with their textual formulation or their underlying purpose. We find that
both text and purpose guide people's reasoning about the scope of a rule.
Overall, a rule’s text more strongly contributed to rule infraction decisions
than did its purpose. The balance of these considerations, however, varied
across experimental conditions: In conditions favoring a spontaneous judgment,
rule interpretation was affected by moral purposes, whereas analytic conditions
resulted in a greater adherence to textual interpretations. In sum, our
findings suggest that the philosophical debate between textualism and
purposivism partly reflects two broader approaches to normative reasoning that
vary within and across individuals.
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