This article takes up the question of whether legal rules are reasons for action. They are commonly regarded in this way, yet are legal rules reasons for action themselves (the reflexivity thesis) or are they instead merely statements of other reasons that we may already have (the paraphrastic thesis)? I argue for a version of the paraphrastic thesis. In doing so, considerable attention is given to the neglected but important puzzle of the opaqueness of rules, which arises out of what some regard as the gap between the evaluative grounds of legal rules and what makes them into reasons for action. After examining an important articulation of the puzzle in the work of Joseph Raz, I argue that the reflexivity thesis is (i) undermined by certain features of rule making and (ii) defeated by the principle of presumptive sufficiency. The result is that it is possible for legal rules to be paraphrastic statements of reasons but, conversely, impossible for them to be reasons in themselves.

中文翻译：

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规则的不透明性

本文讨论了法律规则是否是行动理由的问题。它们通常以这种方式被看待，但法律规则本身是行为的理由（反身性命题），还是仅仅是我们可能已经拥有的其他理由的陈述（释义命题）？我主张一个版本的释义论文。在这样做的过程中，相当多的注意力集中在规则的不透明性这一被忽视但很重要的谜题上，这种谜题源于一些人认为法律规则的评估依据与使它们成为行动理由之间的差距。在检查了约瑟夫·拉兹 (Joseph Raz) 工作中对难题的重要阐述后，我认为反身性命题 (i) 被规则制定的某些特征所破坏，以及 (ii) 被推定充分性原则打败。