Professor Joseph Raz is the world’s most distinguished, legal philosophy scholar — “head and shoulders above everyone else”, according to one of his former students, himself a well-known academic.

Raz has made contributions in many areas of jurisprudence. A prominent legal positivist, he believes morality and the legal system are distinct domains.

According to Raz, if something is a law, it must be possible to identify it as such without resort to any moral judgment, but instead by referring to social sources, such as Acts of Parliament or past judicial decisions.

Of course, the law ought to comply with moral requirements, such as justice. But the positivist’s thesis concerns what law is, not what law ought to be.

The positivist can accept that an antisemitic law in Nazi Germany was an appalling law that should never have been enacted, applied or obeyed. Nevertheless, whether it is valid law is not a matter of morality, but of whether it was enacted according to the procedures set down in the German constitution.

Raz’s most significant book — one that will be read for generations to come — is a work of political philosophy, The Morality of Freedom. Here, he addresses the significance of autonomy and liberalism. “Liberalism”, particularly as interpreted by leading American philosophers in the post-war period, including the towering political philosopher John Rawls, is the doctrine that the state should be neutral between various conceptions of the good life.

It is not up to the state to favour or adjudicate between say, a religious or a secular way of life. 
The state should set the conditions — education, at least minimal welfare standards, certain protections, such as minority rights and free speech — to allow individuals to pursue the life they want to lead, so long as they do not harm others.

Professor Raz’s liberalism is different. He’s an objectivist about the good life — he believes that although there are many ways to lead a good life, not all pursuits and goals are of equal value. And it is the role of the state actively to enable people to live flourishing lives.

In what sense, then, is Raz a “liberal”? Well, for Raz, a foundation to any good life is autonomy, the notion that you should have control over your actions and be free to choose between options, to be the genuine author of your life. If you engage in a particular career or hobby, it can be part of a worthwhile life because you’ve chosen it freely and not had it thrust upon you.

So, whereas Rawls believes in a liberal state because he thinks it is not the state’s job to advance a conception of the good life, Raz supports the liberal state precisely because the state should have a role in shaping our lives — in particular, in giving us control and autonomy.

Unlike Rawls, Raz has been reluctant to debate the implications of his theoretical work for the practical world of policy. Rawls has been hugely influential on the functioning of liberal democracies — nowadays civil servants will invariably interrogate a policy by asking, “what does it mean for the worst off in society” — a question that can be directly traced to Rawls.

But, while others might reach their own inferences from Raz’s writings, Raz himself will not be drawn: “Many political philosophers of the last 50 years write as if they are philosophy-kings in waiting,” he told the JC, but “I find this to be totally fantastical.”

With his impressively abundant salt-and-pepper beard, Joseph Raz has the appearance of a distinguished Orthodox rabbi. His parents were from what is today Ukraine (though they spoke no Ukrainian, only Russian and Polish).

They emigrated to Palestine, where Joseph was born in 1939. The family lived modestly in a one-bedroom apartment. His mother was a nurse, his father first a street cleaner and later an electrician. What extra money they had, they spent on Joseph’s education — every book in the household was his.

It was an entirely secular upbringing. Raz excelled academically and, following a degree at the Hebrew University, he travelled to Oxford, where his PhD adviser was Herbert Hart, a major figure in legal philosophy and himself Jewish — the two became like father-and-son.

Raz has now spent over half-a-century in Britain, much of it in Oxford, where he taught at Balliol. “There can be no question”, he says, “about which country is now home”. He’s currently a professor at King’s College, London.

I asked him whether his Jewishness shaped his academic interests. “I never felt that I chose topics for my academic work because of my ethnicity, though I have no doubt that it, like everything else in my life, found its way into my work.”

As for whether he has a Jewish identity, he delivered an appropriately talmudic response.

“If Jews have a Jewish identity, so do I.”

@DavidEdmonds100