Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-16T19:18:18.370Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Autonomy-Based Liberalism of Joseph Raz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2015

Get access

Extract

Ask a practising liberal to define her political creed, and more likely than not she will begin by describing the wonderful life of the free person. That is, in the parlance of modern political philosophers, she will begin with a conception of the good. The good life is the free life, and the good society is the one where people are as free as possible. By contrast, recent liberal philosophers have for the most part grounded their theories in principles of right or rights. Indeed, some have argued that what is unique about liberalism as a political doctrine is that it is not committed to the advancement of any particular conception of the good, let alone to that of the free person. In his celebrated recent book, The Morality of Freedom, Joseph Raz sides with the practitioner and confronts the pedlars of right-based or deontological liberalism head-on. Believing the history of liberal theory to be against them, he labels his opponents ‘revisionists’. The Morality of Freedom has already been hailed as the most significant new statement of liberal principles since Mill’s On Liberty. And while this may be a bit over-enthusiastic, Raz would welcome at least one philosophical aspect of the comparison with Mill. Both are teleologists who ground their theories of political morality on considerations of the value of the free or autonomous life. I shall dub such theories ‘autonomarian’. And I shall examine Raz’s autonomarian reaction in detail here, for it may well be the most important such theory in the post-Rawlsian era.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Ackerman, B. 1980: Social Justice in the Liberal State. London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Benn, S. 1988: A Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dworkin, R. 1977: Taking Rights Seriously. London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Dworkin, R. 1978: ‘Liberalism’. In Hampshire, S. (ed), Public and Private Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Flathman, R. 1987: The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Haksar, V. 1979: Equality, Liberty and Peifectionism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kymlicka, W. 1989: Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Norman, R. 1987: Free and Equal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nozick, R. 1974: Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rawls, J. 1971: A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rawls, J. 1985: “Justice as Fairness: political not metaphysical”. Philosophy and Public Affairs.Google Scholar
Raz, J. 1986: The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar