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Political Theory
This is a collection of thirteen of Joseph Raz’s essays in moral philosophy. Though some have been published before, the essays illuminate each other and the main themes of a Razian approach to moral philosophy become clearer in the collection. Raz is interested in what it is to engage with value, to give morality a place in one’s practical reasoning. He does not believe there is any special problem in explaining moral action. In fact, a lot of the book is devoted to making our engagement with value seem less problematic than philosophers have made it out to be. Of course, it is not less complicated than practical reason in general; but Raz prefers to emphasize complications like incommensurability and play down the alleged problem of the relation between morality and self-interest. People just act for reasons, he says, that is, for what appear to them to be adequate reasons, regardless of whether or not they serve their well-being.
This volume does not explore the political and legal implications of any of this. But those who are familiar with Raz’s earlier book, The Morality of Freedom, will be in no doubt about their importance for political philosophy. A lot of political philosophy rests on a rather crude view of the relation between autonomy and value. Raz is gently insistent that we should be less careless about it. One other theme that interests him is the relation between morality and social practice. Like most legal positivists, Raz wants to keep this distinction clear; but, as always, what he gives us is a clear view of complication rather than a simple denial that social practice ever makes a difference to what is right. Like all Raz’s work, these essays are forbidding in their density. But the rewards are very high indeed; one comes away with a feeling of having been chided for one’s simple-mindedness by a teacher determined to coax one towards a grasp of complicated truth.
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