In Defence of the Expressive Conception of Norms

1 The Issue in Question

The objective of ‘The Expressive Conception of Norms’ (1981), co-authored by Carlos E. Alchourrón & Eugenio Bulygin, was “to explore [the] possibilities [of the expressive conception] in order to uncover its limitations and show the differences” between the expressive (or pragmatic) conception of norms and the hyletic (or semantic) one. In the end, they came to the conclusion that “the same conceptual distinctions appear in both conceptions, though, of course, expressed in different languages”.¹ In the past three decades, strong objections have been raised against this claim.

In particular, it has been argued that the expressive conception in the form presented by Alchourrón and Bulygin cannot give an account of strong permissions or (at least) of facultative states of affairs (§ 2) without introducing a contradiction into the normative system (§ 3). In the alternative, the argument continues, their Expressivist cannot successfully describe the propositional content of the rules of preference we use to resolve conflicts of ambivalence, for example, without semanticizing the indicator of illocutionary (normative) force (§ 4). This, of course, would imply adopting the hyletic conception. Some also hold that the Expressivist of Alchourrón and Bulygin (1981) cannot account for a permissive rule of closure, if she does not grant the existence of a special normative act of permitting. And, what is more, critics say that the Expressivist is unable to give an adequate representation of conditional norms (§ 5). I intend to show that the opposite is true.²

The following two sections of this paper are of a clarifying nature and they merely formalise the views of Alchourrón and Bulygin. Most definitions introduced in there will not be used in the last two sections, which purport to make an advancement in the expressivist theory. They serve instead to avoid confusion and misunderstanding—which is, in my opinion, the reason for an important part of the critiques mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

2 Fundamental Distinctions

The two major conceptions of norms mentioned in the introduction both assume that ‘norm sentences’ (that is, act-sentences expressing norms) can be analysed into (a) a descriptive component—hereinafter also called ‘propositional content’—which is a description of an action or state of affairs resulting from an action, and (b