Taking Motivations Seriously: The Problem of Internal Reasons and Judicial Review

This paper aims to contribute to the debate about the legitimacy of judicial review. By relying on Bernard Williams’ ideas about reasons for action it aims to provide an additional argument to question the moral-political legitimacy of the practice of judicial review. In short, Bernard Williams’ ideas on internal reasons should be useful to better construct an argument against the legitimacy of judicial review. If only internal reasons can provide reasons for action, and only those reasons in a person’s motivational set do provide such reasons, there isn’t much hope on a text of a constitution providing external reasons to judges who decide on the meaning of a constitutional provision. But as William’s himself points out, a motivational set might be subject to change, if the person is shown why she should adopt into it a concrete reason. As I will argue, this process of deliberation in a pluralist society makes sense in a democratic arena rather than in a courtroom.