Reviews

Date01 January 1996
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1996.tb02072.x
Published date01 January 1996
REVIEWS
Joseph
Raz,
Ethics in the Public
Domain,
Oxford Clarendon Press,
1994,
x+364 pp, hb
&40.00.
This book brings together fourteen of Joseph Raz’s previously published papers,
as
well
as
two unpublished papers. The seven
essays
in
the first part of the book take
up issues in political theory, in particular the notions of well-being, autonomy,
community and the common good. These notions are tackled indirectly, emerging
in chapters that discuss, inter alia, ‘Rights and Individual Well-being,’ ‘Liberalism,
Scepticism and Democracy,’ ‘Free Expression and Personal Identification’ and
‘Multiculturalism.’ The second part of the collection consists of nine essays
tackling issues of law and morality. Here, Raz is concerned with the status of
contemporary legal positivism and its constituent parts, such as the sources thesis,
and with the nature of adjudication and the contours of legitimate authority. The
volume is an excellent companion to Raz’s major work,
The Morality
of
Freedom
(Oxford: Clarendon,
1986),
since many of the essays in the first part both
supplement and apply to particular contexts the arguments used in the earlier book.
The volume stands
as
confirmation
-
if such were needed
-
of the fact that
Raz
is, within what may be rather loosely called the analytical
or
orthodox tradition,
one of
our
pre-eminent legal and political theorists. Whether one’s intellectual
self-
conception locates one within that tradition
or
not, one cannot fail to learn from the
essays here; nor can one fail to be impressed by both the rigour of many
of
the
arguments offered and the candour with which their limits are admitted. Forty
pounds is not an excessive price (though it is uncomfortably close) for such
-
admittedly undeniable
-
virtues.
The
essays
in the first part of the book succeed in highlighting the features and
benefits of
Raz’s
particular and distinctive brand of liberalism. That brand of
liberalism roots
our
rights and liberties,
our
obligations and duties, as well
as
values such as toleration and justice, in
a
conception of the good life. The good
life, for
Raz,
is one which is both lived in the right way and in the right
circumstances. The right way to live a life, for Raz, is to live it autonomously.
Such a life has two dimensions. ‘The first is that of self-definition. It is the thought
that what
we
are is, in significant respects, what we become through successive
choices during
our
lives, that
our
lives are a continuous process of self-creation
. .
.
The second aspect
.
. .
is that autonomy is valuable only if one steers a course for
one’s life through significant choices among diverse and valuable options. The
underlying idea is that autonomous people had a variety of incompatible
opportunities available to them’ (p 104). Since Raz’s liberalism is unambiguously
founded upon a conception of the good life, it is appropriately regarded
as
perfectionist. It therefore stands in marked contrast to those accounts of liberalism
offered by,
inter alios,
Friedrich von Hayek, John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin,
which insist that political and legal decisions, practices and institutions must stand
independent of any account of the good life.
Furthermore, Raz’s liberalism is one which avoids the excessive individualism
that has traditionally beset forms of the doctrine. It is
a
liberalism which, contrary
to the complaints of many communitarian political philosophers, emphasises the
embeddedness of individuals in their communities and recognises that, in some
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sense, communities determine individuals’ identities (see, for example, pp
162-
163).
The link between autonomy and community is obvious.
The
former is a
meaningful possibility only in a society
in
which a variety of incompatible options
exist and flourish. That would
be,
says
Raz,
‘[a] pluralistic society,
. . .
[one which]
not only recognises the existence of a multiplicity of values but also makes their
pursuit a real option available to its members’ (p
104).
But something more than
this is surely required.
As
stated
so
far, a pluralistic ‘society’ appears to be little
more than a menu of different life types and chances that one is perfectly free to
take or leave. This is indeed
an
impoverished view of society, perfectly appropriate
for those who, surely in moments of hyperbole, deny such a thing exists.
Fortunately,
Raz
is not one of them. For, as reflection upon the menu analogy
shows,
we
need to share some ‘things’
-
at the very least a language and a culture
-
in
order for it to make sense for us. And,
as
Raz
rightly notes, the pursuit of
multiple and ‘incompatible’
(ibid)
options depends upon a common culture, in the
following way.
‘The
core options which give meaning to our lives
. .
.
are
all dense
webs of complex actions and interactions
. . .
They
are available only to those who
have or can acquire practical knowledge of
them,
that is, knowledge embodied in
social practices and transmitted by habituation
. . .
Only by being socialised in a
culture can one tap the options which give life a meaning’ (p
162).
Moreover, in some circumstances
the
common culture has
an
obviously political
role, in that it provides
us
-
conceived
as
proponents of different conceptions of
the good,
as
committed to incompatible ranges of core options
-
with a corpus of
ideas and rules upon which we agree and by reference to which we can resolve our
disputes. ‘[Tlhe way to relate to others who do not share our conception of the
good is to establish a scheme of co-operation, to which all would agree and which
would enable all to pursue their own conceptions of the good within fair terms of
co-operation’ (p
65)
.
This, of course, is a public conception of justice which, if not
conceived by all its members in exactly that way, is nevertheless ‘part of the
common culture of modem constitutional democracies’
(ibid).
Contrary to the
view of Rawls,
Raz
shows that such a public conception of justice must be rooted
in a conception of the good (pp
46-69).
Fortunately for
Raz,
this does not
mean
that the conception of justice is sectarian, applicable only to those sharing the
conception of the good life upon which
it
depends. For ‘our own endorsement of a
doctrine of justice
from the point
of
view
of
our
own conception
of
the
good
. .
.
depends on that doctrine’s acceptability to other people in our society, who do not
share our conception of the good. Hence, there is the possibility of give and take.
We are willing, upon reflection, to modify our interpretation of the common
culture and those aspects of our conception of the good on which it depends’ (p
65;
emphasis mine). Why? Because we
are
liberals
in
Raz’s
sense, committed to
plurality and autonomy. Hence, we want to achieve some kind of consensus
or,
via
media:
we
must ‘reach the kind of agreement that
our
conception of the good
recommends’
(ibid).
This is a powerful vision of liberalism that can neither
be
adequately elucidated
nor evaluated
in
the course of a brief review. The vision seems even more
compelling given the work it seems to do for us in
a
range of contexts and the
remarkably
few
snags it generates. For example,
Raz’s
argument to show that the
interest theory of rights
-
though not perhaps the will theory
-
must
be
rooted
within some account of the common good is difficult to deny (see pp3143).
Similarly, his demonstration of the ways in which accounts of justice, and
particularly Rawls’ account,
are
premised upon either a conception of the good life
or a commitment to some non-neutral values is extremely powerful. He also
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