Does liberalism without individualism, human rights at its foundation, and a belief that the state should stay out of people’s lives even make sense? Joseph Raz, who died on May 2^nd, believed it did.  Raz was a world-renowned legal and political philosopher whose book, The Morality of Freedom, offered a way of marrying liberalism with a traditionally opposed political philosophy: perfectionism. According to the latter, the state has a duty to actively promote the good of its subjects, whereas liberalism has been traditionally understood as supporting the state’s neutrality when it comes to how people live their lives. Political philosopher and past doctoral student of Joseph Raz, Steven Wall, explains how seeing autonomy as a fundamental human good allowed the marriage of liberalism and perfectionism.

Liberal political theory is a family of competing views.  The differences between the members of the family are important, and have occupied the attention of writers for some time, but it has been widely assumed that liberalism, however it is best conceived, is committed to one or more of the following:  individualism, rights-centered morality, and neutrality with regard to different understandings of the good life.  In his magisterial book The Morality of Freedom, and in a series of subsequent papers, Joseph Raz presented an attractive view of liberalism that rejected all of these commitments.

SUGGESTED READING The legacy of Charles Mills By Jason Stanley In the jargon of contemporary political philosophy, Raz’s version of liberalism is avowedly “perfectionist” in that it rejects the notion that governments should be neutral among different understandings of the good life, as many species of liberalism claim.  Rather, governments, on the Razian view, are charged with the responsibility of promoting the good of those subject to their authority.  To discharge this responsibility, governments must actively assist their subjects in their own efforts to lead good lives, which are understood to be the product of successful engagement with objectively valuable, and not merely subjectively valued or desired, pursuits, activities and relationships.  To be sure, universal agreement on what is of objective value is not to be expected in modern societies.  But Razian liberalism, unlike social contract versions of liberalism, is not committed to the idea that political morality is the object of agreement between the members of a society.

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The perfectionism of Razian liberalism, which has affinities with the older liberalisms of J.S. Mill and the 19^th century British idealist T. H. Green, sets it apart from many other liberal views.  Liberal writers often insist that people have rights to make their own choices about how to live, and so long as these choices do not violate the rights of others, their resulting consequences should not be a matter of common concern.  Yet to lead good lives we need more than our rights protected.  We must live in a social and cultural environment that provides us with access to valuable options.  Effective access to valuable options requires not only the negative freedom to pursue them, but also the positive means to do so.  Such an environment, Raz argued, is a collective good, one that is intrinsically valuable, but not one that we could claim to have a right to as individuals.  Collectively, we may have a right to the environment in question, but our individual needs and interests taken on their own would not be sufficient to establish a duty on the part of others, or our government, to secure it for us.  Our right to such environment must be justified by the fact that it serves the interests of us all.

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