RIP Joseph Raz

Two weeks ago, philosopher Joseph Raz passed away- RIP. Raz’s level-headed arguments about "autonomy" and "paternalism" help cut through alot of the insane thinking about that dichotomy, which modern day liberals emote so often about. His books absolutely belong on your shelf next to JS Mill’s On Liberty and John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. And like those books, The Morality of Freedom is not great wisdom about ethics in itself, but is certainly useful for understanding what the heck is going on in modern liberals’ brains when they’re thinking about ethics.

Here are some notes from two class lectures I gave about Raz a few years ago; enjoy:

Lecture I
Today's discussion will be the first part of a two-part discussion of paternalism and autonomy. We will be discussing the arguments of two comprehensive liberal thinkers about this topic today- Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz. We will discuss a response/critique of those views provided by a natural law thinker, Chris Wolfe, next time.

Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz are two Oxford-trained legal philosophers in the same ballpark as John Rawls. In fact, they all had the same teacher at Oxford: Dworkin, Raz, and Rawls all studied with H. L. A. Hart, and they are all liberals of one sort or another. What did Hart teach these liberal philosophers, besides their methods of argument? The main thing Hart focused on in his own scholarship was the moral authority judges and the law either have or do not have. As a legal positivist, Hart held that the law has no moral authority or teaching aspect in and of itself. And so it is no surprise that autonomy and paternalism is a major topic debated by his students.

What is autonomy? We've discussed that before with the Robert George piece- it is freedom, self sufficiency, or- as radical individualists like DC Richards see it- autonomy is self-definition in every respect. In some ways, autonomy and self-definition appear to be at loggerheads with law, which by definition is a kind of binding force. Paternalism, as the name suggests, is the idea that someone with a claim to know better should run things, just as a father is in charge of his kids when they are little. Some of the most frustrating paternalism in our recent history occurred with European colonialism of other cultures around the world. Is it appropriate for a government to treat its citizens like children, to adopt a paternalistic pattern with its laws? Or should the government respect its citizens' autonomy and avoid paternalism as much as possible?...

...Joseph Raz believed paternalism was warranted and unavoidable for government and the social forms found in institutions; that it was not morally wrong for some paternalism to be shown toward citizens. In fact, he believed some paternalism was morally required; and, yet he was a liberal, holding to a pluralistic view of morality for citizens. At the end of the day, the only thing that could justify coercive paternalism in moral matters for him was trust. Trust that our friends or a family member would not lead us astray allows for due respect for autonomy; not so with the strangers we find in government. So, at the end of the day Raz would usually be against government "legislating morality"; one possibility to consider is, do we trust our government? Raz provides some interesting hypotheticals when it comes to autonomy. Examples: Odysseus coerced by his trusted sailors, a doctor coercing a patient, a friend coercing another friend for a surprise birthday party.

Lecture II
Is Joseph Raz's claim that paternalism is only justified when the coercion is done by a trusted friend that would not lead us astray and have due respect for autonomy correct?

... A general point is to say that Raz curtails paternalism too greatly by limiting it to coercion by trusted friends; a decent government is one that we should expect to be able to trust, and therefore can justifiably exert coercion. Raz would allow that, but says that modern governments do not have enough participation by citizens to meet that standard. Perhaps Raz's bar is too high in expecting that; he sets up a "catch 22" for paternalism and government that doesn't make sense.

Wolfe says that trust can be a prudential factor in whether you would allow a friend to coerce you, but it may in fact be irrelevant for whether government IN PRINCIPLE is justified in coercing you. What matters is whether the reason for coercion really is a good reason, not from whom it comes. The natural law principle of subsidiarity tells us that who makes a decision can matter for taking ownership of a decision; for example, I take ownership of my care for a car, because I chose which car to buy. That may be the intuition that Raz was appealing to when he said trust was what justifies paternalism.