Raz, history and pluralism

I’m very grateful to John Tasioulas for his series on Joe Raz. Oh dear, this was going to be a short note, but I think I am rambling on long enough for this to be a short article.

As somebody who sees Raz’s legacy from inside political philosophy, it’s a strange thought to me that The Morality of Freedom 1986 might not be a central book. Certainly, when I was doing my PhD on political freedom 20 years ago, as far as books went, it was probably only second to John Rawls’ Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism.

Now for some ungrateful (but really, very grateful) remarks. The Aristotelian quality of Raz’s thought is important, and distinguishes Raz’s schematic position from that of Williams or Hampshire or Wollheim or Berlin. Clearly, some things that are important to Raz will depend on how far we can talk about the normativity of human nature. Raz wants to go further with this, and this will sit and fall with judgements about the reconstitution of an Aristotelian way of doing moral philosophy. That’s one ungrateful remark.

Another ungrateful remark is that social understanding and historical understanding were incredibly important to Raz. Their importance sat differently in Raz than it did in Williams, and Williams found Raz not to be as historical a philosopher as he would have liked him to be. How to parse these differences is not a brief matter, but this gives me an opportunity to step out of my ungrateful remarks into a a last grateful one.

One of the wonderful things about Raz - and it’s a delight to reflect on John’s deep relationship with Raz - is that Raz was one of the thinkers who was very ready to admit that he didn’t know what he thought, and that he didn’t know where his agreements and disagreements with significant others ended or began. Charles Taylor today is the leading manifestation of this sensibility.

Now a pedantic remark to finish. When we talk about value incommensurability it is very important to distinguish two thoughts. One is a conceptual claim about incommensurability to do with the way incommensurability precludes general and determinate ways of arbitrating values. Another is a contingent claim about incommensurable value conflict in practice. For instance, a thought that Isaiah Berlin had, and indeed a thought Berlin had too strongly, is that in practice it will rarely be the case that there is a clear right option to take when two elaborations of incommensurable values conflict in practice. But of course, there is no connection between the two. You can think that very often there will be one right thing to do in practice when incommensurable values conflict. It’s just that the rightness of the choice will not be derivable at the level of abstraction at which incommensurability precludes arbitration.

I’ve gone on far too long. One absolutely final remark. Aristotelian in sensibility, though not in sense. Passing of the baton inter-generational tributes are so important to our liquid culture, in which even inter-generational academic bonds are becoming liquid. So John, thanks for the celebration of Raz!