Exclusionary reasons and mental contamination: a challenge for Raz’s theory of authority

According to Joseph Raz, authoritative directives are exclusionary reasons, which means that people have normative reasons not to act on their personal assessment of the merit of the case even though this doesn’t imply that they have to surrender their personal judgment. The exclusionary model of authority is contrasted with the weighing model. One reason to accept the exclusionary model of authority over the weighing model is that human beings are fallible and obedience to the law can be a way to protect them from bias. This article questions the ability of the exclusionary model to counteract biases. To do so, it combines three different traditions of empirical studies: a general framework on our inability to intentionally ignore relevant or quasi-relevant information — studies on ‘mental contamination’; Jonathan Haidt's research on the conflict between moral reasoning and moral intuitions; and studies on motivated reasoning. While the overall picture does not doom the exclusionary model, it provides reason to articulate it as implying that surrender of judgment is often important.