Joseph Raz as a Political Philosopher
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Author | David Owens |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12764 |
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Modern Law Review
DOI:10.1111/1468-2230.12764
REVIEW ARTICLE
Joseph Raz as a Political Philosopher
David Owens∗
Joseph Raz,The Roots of Normativity, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2022, 306pp, (hb), £30
The Roots of Normativity (Roots) is the last work Joseph Raz published before
his death in May 2022. Like many of his books it is a collection of papers.
Some focus on issues that will likely be of most interest to philosophers of
mind and ethics, topics such as the nature of intention, the binding force of a
promise,the components of human well-being and the theoretical signicance
of the notion of a reason. Others consider topics in social philosophy, topics
on which Raz made an enormous contribution. In what follows I’ll treat The
Roots of Normativity as a point of entry to Raz’s political and social philosophy
in particular.
Across some dozen books and numerous articles, Raz laid out a distinctive
and intr icately str uctured philosophy of ethics, politics and law. He showed
little interest in producing denitive statements – ‘one is forever searching for
understanding, and the further one travels the further o the goal appears’1–
and in presenting his work as a cohesive whole I am engaged in a rather un-
Razian project. Still Raz was a highly systematic thinker whose passing brought
an end to his intellectual journey.Able now to review its entire course,we can
discern its leading ideas and trace their interconnections.
What most clearly distinguishes Raz’s social thought from its surroundings
is the absence of justice. The agenda of Anglophone political philosophy of the
last few decades was set by Rawls’s ‘A Theory of Justice’ when he wrote that
‘justice is the rst virtue of social institutions.’2Rawls thereby made justice the
master value of political philosophy. By contrast, in the index of Raz’s most
∗Kings College London. Many thanks to Crescente Molina,Ezequiel Monti, Felix Koch, Sam Schef-
er,Sandy Steel,Amanda Greene,Sebastian Lewis,Daniel Vieho, Ulrike Heuer, Sam Ishii-Gonzales
and to two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft.
1JosephRaz,Ethics in Public Domain (Oxford: OUP,1994) (Ethics)v.
2 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: OUP, 1994) (Justice)3.
© 2022 The Authors. The Modern Law Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Modern Law Review Limited.
(2022)85(6) MLR 1576–1591
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License,which per mits
use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited,the use is non-commercial and no modications or
adaptations are made.
David Owens
realised work of political and moral philosophy ‘justice’merits no entr y.3What
is at stake here? How does making justice your master value shape your thought
about society and why would anyone take a dierent tack? The notion of justice
has long been important to political theory and prevalent in political discourse
but its current pre-eminence among Anglophone political philosophers is, at
least in part, due to many of them conceiving of it as what I shall call a formal
rather than a personal value.4Whilst I take the notion of ‘personal value’ from
Raz, ‘formal value’ is my coinage. Raz’s theoretical motivations become clearer
once we read him as denying the existence of formal values.
FORMAL AND PERSONAL VALUES
When asked what sort of thing you value, you’ll likely mention benets, ie
things which are good for you and/or for others.5So, for example, living in
a place with a temperate climate or pleasing architecture or a secure and sup-
portive family structure is a good thing, one which makes all our lives go better.
Such benets are what Raz calls personal values.6By contrast, a formal value like
justice is not necessarily of benet to anyone.Making the distr ibution of wealth
more just by, for example, making it more equal might well involve benetting
someone (by giving them money) but, if so, that is a contingent by-product of
the removal of the injustice. (The same is true when justice is instantiated in
formal values other than equality.) This appeal to justice is meant to solve a
problem, namely that we either can’t or shouldn’t make social choices on the
basis of personal values alone, so let’s rst consider why one might doubt that
social choice can be based on personal values, ie benets.
The practical signicance of personal value is no mystery, for a benet is
something worth having. So, when assessing the merits of social ar rangements
such as our climate policies, our planning regulations or our family structures,
why not ask after the costs and benets associated with those arrangements,
3JosephRaz,The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: OUP, 1986) (Morality). Raz says that ‘a complete
political morality must include a doctrine of justice’ (ibid,2) but he tells us nothing about what
form that doctrine will take nor whether he had in mind principles of commutative or procedural
justice rather than social justice or distributive justice.
4 Raz himself contrasts ‘personal’with ‘impersonal’ values and cites the aesthetic value of the Grand
Canyon as a possible example of the latter.See Roots,214. By calling justice (etc) a ‘formal’ value
I aim to bring to mind a dierent idea, namely the Kantian notion that moral principles bind
in virtue of their form. For Rawls formal values were to provide the foundations for a special
morality of politics and would play that role regardless of whether the morality of everyday life
could be based on formal values. On p. 4, Raz denies that there is such a ‘semi-autonomous
political morality’.
5 In what follows I shall use ‘value’and ‘good’ interchangeably and where a good is of benet to
someone, I shall also say that it serves their needs or their interests.
6 ‘I will proceed on the assumption that all values areper sonal.I will take it to entail that anything
which is of value can be good for someone’ (Roots,214). However, Raz does not believe that
all that has value is good because it is good for someone (ibid). He maintains only that all goods
can be good for someone, can be of benet to someone. See also Joseph Raz, Val u e , R e s p e c t an d
Attachment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) (Va l u e ) 148-151 and Ethics n1above,
260 and 263.
© 2022 The Authors. The Modern Law Review published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd on behalf of Moder n LawReview Limited.
(2022) 85(6) MLR 1576–1591 1577
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