Joseph Raz as a Political Philosopher

The Roots of Normativity 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 significance of the notion of a reason. Others consider topics in social philosophy, topics on which Raz made an enormous contribution. 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’, which made justice the master value of political philosophy. By contrast, in the index of Raz’s most realised work of political and moral philosophy ‘justice’ merits no entry. What is at stake here? How does making justice your master value shape your thought about society and why would anyone take a different 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. Raz’s theoretical motivations become clearer once we read him as denying the existence of formal values.