Editor’s introduction

The four original papers and the critical comments on them gathered here are based on presentations given at the workshop, Reasons and Normativity: Themes from the Philosophy of Joseph Raz, which took place on 26–27 June 2022 at Bentham House, UCL. This workshop was part of the ERC (European Research Council) advanced grant research project, Roots of Responsibility: Metaphysics, Humanity, and Society, whose objective was to investigate how traditional philosophical debates about responsibility can be advanced by looking at the social and institutional contexts in which questions about responsibility arise and get addressed.

Roots of Responsibility’s Principal Investigator John Hyman and I began planning the workshop towards the end of 2021, in collaboration with Ulrike Heuer, who had recently finished editing what would become the last collection of essays by Raz published in his lifetime, The Roots of Normativity.¹ The idea of dedicating a project workshop to themes from Raz readily suggested itself, in view of the wide-ranging influence Raz’s views and arguments have exerted on philosophical debates about responsibility; the workshop would also be an excellent occasion for scholars to celebrate the publication of The Roots of Normativity and to begin engaging with the topics explored therein.

Raz had previously participated in a number of events organised by Roots of Responsibility, and for this workshop he was party to the planning at the early stage. Sadly, however, he passed away on 2 May 2022, less than two months before the workshop was due to take place. We decided to incorporate a session during the workshop to celebrate and commemorate Raz’s life and work, and accordingly the first day included three tributes, from Ulrike Heuer, Andrei Marmor, and Tim Scanlon. The entire workshop was a great success, and the high quality of the papers presented as well as the stimulating critical discussion on them that ensued persuaded us that we should publish the proceedings.

The four papers we present here span a wide range of topics: normative powers, promising, exclusionary reasons, action-guidance, reasons explanation, value, rational capacities, and responsibility. It is a testament to the scale of Raz’s vision that all of these topics receive sustained, illuminating, and ramifying treatment in Raz’s corpus of writings. What is more – as I shall venture to suggest – these parts do not make up a haphazard assemblage of severally interesting discussions, but rather constitute a unified picture of our ‘Being in the World’ (to use the pregnant phrase Raz himself used),² which one may understand Raz to have been drawing from the beginning of his publishing career.

To begin, then, with Jed Lewinsohn’s contribution. Raz discusses normative powers (such as the power to make a promise and thereby undertake an obligation), suggesting that their existence is explained by the value of agents’ possessing and exercising them, in two papers written during the last decade, ‘Normative Powers’ and ‘Is There a Reason to Keep a Promise?’, collected as chapters 7 and 8 of The Roots of Normativity.³ Lewinsohn’s paper may be studied usefully along with these recent papers. However, as Lewinsohn notes, Raz took up the matter as early as in 1972,⁴ and revisiting Raz’s works from the seventies after Lewinsohn’s paper, one may find instructive parallels and divergences between Lewinsohn’s arguments for the ‘natural unintelligibility’ of normative powers and Raz’s elucidation of the background socio-political conditions in reference to which the distinctive features of specifically legal norms – centrally their authority – may be articulated. Particularly relevant are Raz’s argument that identification of laws as constituting a legal system requires an explanatorily prior analysis of the state, as well as his criticism of Hart’s classification of functions of the law, respectively in chapters 5 and 9 of The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality.⁵

Ezequiel Monti’s focus is on exclusionary reasons – a category of second-order reasons which Raz elaborated on in Practical Reason and Norms (originally published in 1975; the monograph’s 1990 edition contains a new postscript entitled ‘Rethinking Exclusionary Reasons’).⁶ Monti elsewhere criticises Raz’s account of obligation – closely linked to the conception of legal norms as issuing exclusionary reasons – from the perspective of broadly Strawsonian moral psychology. In the present contribution, however, he defends the existence of exclusionary reasons by explaining the way in which they guide action. Monti’s critical discussion prompts us to re-examine Raz’s considered views on exclusionary reasons (given in the aforementioned postscript), in particular how they relate to first-order ethical reasons grounded in people’s well-being, our personal relationship with others, and so on – topics Raz explored most recently in the four essays making up Part III of The Roots of Normativity.⁷

Equally relevant here is the bearing of practical reasons on practical deliberation and on reasons explanation of action, or what Raz calls ‘the normative/explanatory nexus’,⁸ which is what Hille Paakkunainen subjects to critical appraisal in her contribution.

Paakkunainen agrees with the general claim embedded in the ‘nexus’, but argues that it does not sit well with Raz’s ‘value-based’ conception of reasons, favouring instead a ‘reasoning-based’ conception that Paakkunainen advocates. Whether or not Paakkunainen’s arguments succeed, they raise the question just how different the two conceptions are. Over the years, Raz developed a highly complex account of values and reasoning, paying close attention especially to cases of conflict, in which both values and reasoning are involved crucially though differently: incommensurable values as their sources, and decision reached as the result of (but not necessarily mandated by) reasoning as a distinctive way in which we practical reasoners might resolve them. Raz’s primary texts that merit revisiting in this connection include Part Two of From Normativity to Responsibility,⁹ The Practice of Value,¹⁰ and the Introduction and his own contribution to Practical Reasoning.¹¹ One might also recall that Raz sought to understand the authority of directives such as laws in terms of the role they play in the subject’s practical reasoning, or more specifically, in advancing the subject from the reasoning’s deliberative to the executive stage.¹²

In the fourth and last of the original papers in this special issue, Erasmus Mayr takes up a key topic to which Raz turned increasingly during the last fifteen years of his life: responsibility. Raz’s work on responsibility is a keystone to his account of our Being in the World, an organising principle informing and tying together all the other parts of the picture.

Mayr is largely sympathetic to Raz’s account of responsibility as sketched in Part Three of From Normativity to Responsibility, according to which the reach of responsibility is determined by what Raz calls ‘the domain of secure competence’,¹³ within which the powers the subject has as a rational being operate. Mayr’s main contention is that this account needs supplementing, in order to accommodate certain failures that result from the malfunctioning of those of our agential powers of which we do not have a secure command, but for which we are responsible nonetheless. Mayr’s discussion suggests just how far we must go, if we are to have a faithful picture of the scope of our responsible engagement with the world, beyond those over-intellectualising conceptions according to which we are responsible for all and only what is within the purview of rational control and guidance. The faculty of reason is only part of the adequately comprehensive picture of our Being in the World.

There are indications in From Normativity to Responsibility that Raz was looking in this direction. He suggests that not all our capacities relating to conduct (including attitudes and reactions) – not even all the capacities we possess qua rational animals – are themselves rational capacities.¹⁴ He also notes in the opening chapter that ‘discussing the way our rational capacities shape our Being in the World … is liable to distort the greater picture by overrating the role of our rational capacities’.¹⁵ Completion of this ‘greater picture’, however, remains an unfinished business.

Throughout his career, Raz retained the general methodological orientation traceable to the mid-twentieth century ordinary language philosophy via Hart, of painstakingly attending to the messy array of concepts that have evolved in our culture.¹⁶ At the same time, he has travelled a long way, from his earliest project of inheriting Hart’s modern positivist picture of law, beyond the articulation of the nature of practical reason, towards extra-rational aspects of our Being in the World. Raz began, in other words, in his later work to tackle phenomena found near the boundaries of the jurisdiction in which reason exerts governing control. In metaethics, philosophy of action, and philosophy of criminal law, instructive examples of such phenomena include partiality, communication among radically divergent moral communities, moral luck, culpable negligence, and aberrant or botched exercises of the powers of conduct human beings possess, e.g., absent-minded omissions, akratic acts, uncontrolled outbursts of emotions, reactions that are ‘out of character’, etc. These are some of the topics on which Raz worked until the end of his life, envisioning a picture of our Being in the World, which he must have thought required more than an account of our rational engagement with the world, indispensable though that may be.

Human beings are rational animals; Raz, however, endeavoured to depict a less naïve and more exact truth: he sought to portray the way in which we live in the world with others as imperfectly and impurely rational animals. Like some of the photographs he published, Raz’s philosophical picture presents its subject matter in an uncompromisingly realistic spirit, capturing it with all its brutal details and dense complexities. We shall be studying it for many years to come; the papers collected in this issue are sure to provide many sparks inspiring the reader to carry the conversation forward.

Many thanks to Verónica Rodriguez-Blanco and other members of the Editorial Board of Jurisprudence, as well as their anonymous reviewer. The editing of this special issue was supported by Roots of Responsibility, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 789270). The ERC’s generous support is gratefully acknowledged.¹⁷

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 (Oxford UP 2022).

2 Joseph Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (Oxford UP 2011) chapter 12.

3 Raz (n1).

4 Joseph Raz, ‘Voluntary Obligations and Normative Powers’ (1972) 46 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 79.

5 (2nd edn, Oxford UP 2009; 1st edn, Clarendon 1979).

6 (Oxford UP 1990).

7 Raz (n1).

8 Raz (n2), chapter 2.

9 Raz (n2).

10 (Clarendon 2003)

11 Joseph Raz (ed.), Practical Reasoning (Oxford UP 1978).

12 This can be seen arguably in Raz’s service conception of authority. See: Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon 1988) chapter 3; Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (Rev. edn., Clarendon 1995) chapter 10; Joseph Raz, Between Authority and Interpretation: On the Theory of Law and Practical Reason (Oxford UP 2009) chapter 5.

13 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n2) 243.

14 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n2) 227; see more generally chapter 5.

15 Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (n2) 5.

16 See Raz, Between Authority and Interpretation (n12) Part III.

17 John Hyman read an early draft of this introduction and provided valuable comments, for which I am grateful.