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Joseph Raz (; ; born Joseph Zaltsman; 21 March 19392 May 2022) was an Israeli Legal philosophy, Moral philosophy and political philosopher. He was an advocate of legal positivism and is known for his conception of perfectionist liberalism. Raz spent most of his career as a professor of philosophy of law at Balliol College, Oxford, and was latterly a part-time professor of law at Columbia University Law School and a part-time professor at King's College London. He received the Tang Prize in Rule of Law in 2018.
After completing his PhD, Raz returned to Israel to teach at the Hebrew University as a lecturer in the faculty of law and department of philosophy. In 1971, he was given tenure and promoted to senior lecturer. In 1972, he returned to Balliol as a fellow and tutor in law, becoming a professor of philosophy of law, Oxford University, from 1985 to 2006, and then a research professor from 2006 to 2009. In 2002, he also became a professor at Columbia Law School in New York and starting in 2011 was a research professor of law at King's College London.
Raz died on 2 May 2022 at Charing Cross Hospital in his sleep. The Oxford Law Faculty called him "one of the last remaining giants of jurisprudence and philosophy".
In defending his conception of perfectionist liberalism, Raz argues that political institutions are justified by virtue of their contribution to persons' well-being. He argues that a person's well-being depends on ability to pursue personal goals. However, in Raz's view, well-being does not occur upon achievement of any self-set goal. Rather, in David McCabe's words, "successful pursuit of objectively valuable goals" produces well-being according to Raz.
Raz's argument for perfectionist liberalism follows from this view of well-being combined with two other premises. First, that human goalsand, therefore, human well-beingare conceived through, and depend on, what McCabe calls "social forms". Social forms are ways of being and acting that are developed socially and make sense only in the context of a given society. For example, one can only understand the social roles of a physician, Friendship, or parent by considering the rights and obligations that attach to that role in a social context.
The second premise of the argument is that people need autonomy to occupy many social forms in liberal societies and achieve the goals that these social forms set out. Thus, a person must be autonomous to achieve the goals set by the social forms in a liberal society. Combined with Raz's view that political institutions are justified by virtue of their contribution to well-being and his argument that well-being, for humans, depends on social forms, his claim about autonomy shows that autonomy is necessary for well-being wherever social forms require autonomy. If liberal societies' social forms require autonomy, then liberal societies should support autonomy.
Raz argued for a distinctive understanding of legal commands as exclusionary reasons for action and for the "service conception" of authority, according to which those subject to an authority "can benefit by its decisions only if they can establish their existence and content in ways which do not depend on raising the very same issues which the authority is there to settle". This, in turn, supports Raz's argument for legal positivismin particular "the sources thesis", "the idea that an adequate test for the existence and content of law must be based only on social facts, and not on moral arguments".
Raz's work has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada in such cases as British Columbia v Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd and Sauvé v Canada (Chief Electoral Officer).
Several of Raz's students became legal and moral philosophers, including two current professors in jurisprudence at Oxford, Leslie Green and Timothy Endicott, and the former professor of jurisprudence John Gardner.
In 2000–2001, he gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values on "The Practice of Value" at the University of California, Berkeley.
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