Analysis - Joseph Raz theory on Perfectionalism and Autonomy

Citation: 62 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1097 1988-89

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AUTONOMY AND PERFECTIONISMIN RAZ'S MORALITY OF FREEDOM

JEREMY WALDRON

I. INTRODUCTION ....................................... 1098A. THE NEUTRALITY PRINCIPLE ........................ 1098B. RAZ'S CRITIQUE OF NEUTRALITY .................... 1100

II. AUTONOMY ............................................ 1103A. THE CONCEPT OF LIBERTY ........................... 1103B. PERSONAL AUTONOMY ............................... 1105C. AUTONOMY AND NEEDS ............................. 1108D. AUTONOMY AND MORAL CHOICE .................... 1109

III. THE CONDITIONS FOR AUTONOMY ................. 1114A. AUTONOMY AS CAPACITY ............................ 1114B. COERCION AND DEPRIVATION ........................ 1115C. MANIPULATION ...................................... 1117D. THE AVAILABILITY OF OPTIONS ..................... 1120E. Is THERE A RIGHT TO AUTONOMY? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1123F. MORAL INDIVIDUALISM .............................. 1125

IV. PERFECTIONISM ....................................... 1127A. THE VALUE OF AN AUTONOMOUS LIFE .............. 1127B. IMMORAL OPTIONS ................................... 1130C. LIBERAL NEUTRALITY ............................... 1133D. COERCION AND THE STATE .......................... 1138E. NON-COERCIVE PERFECTIONISM ...................... 1141

1. Taxation ......................................... 11422. Subsidies ......................................... 11473. Legal Frameworks ................................ 1149

V. CONCLUSION ........................................... 1152

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HeinOnline -- 62 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1097 1988-89

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 62:1097

AUTONOMY AND PERFECTIONISMIN RAZ'S MORALITY OF FREEDOM

JEREMY WALDRON*

I. INTRODUCTION

A. THE NEUTRALITY PRINCIPLE

The idea that the law should be neutral between different views insociety about what makes life worth living has become a prominenttheme in modem liberal thought. Though it was originally rooted in theview that the state should. refrain from any particular religious commit-ment, recent arguments have extended the idea of neutrality to embracesecular ethics as well.

The neutrality principle's formulation is reasonably familiar. Ron-ald Dworkin presents it as a distinctively liberal conception of equalrespect. He says that liberal equality:

supposes that political decisions must be, so far as possible, independ-ent of any particular conception of the good life, or of what gives valueto life. Since the citizens of a society differ in their conceptions, thegovernment does not treat them as equals if it prefers one conceptionto another .... 1

Bruce Ackerman imposes neutrality as a dialogic constraint on whatcounts as a good reason for the differential distribution of power oradvantage in society: "No reason is a good reason if it requires the powerholder to assert ... that his conception of the good is better than thatasserted by any of his fellow citizens ... ." And we find similar views

* Acting Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, University of Califor-

nia at Berkeley. B.A. 1974, LL.B. 1978, D.Phil. (Law) 1986, Oxford University. An earlier versionof this Article was presented at the American Political Science Association's meetings in Washing-ton D.C., in August 1988. The author is grateful to the other participants in that presentation fortheir comments and also to Jill Frank for her assistance in the preparation of the Article.

1. R. DWORKIN, A MATrER OF PRINCIPLE 191 (1985).2. B. ACKERMAN, SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE LIBERAL STATE 11 (1980).

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AUTONOMY AND PERFECTIONISM

implied or suggested in utilitarian philosophy3 and in recent non-utilita-rian work on the theory of justice by Robert Nozick and John Rawls.4

But while the neutrality principle is familiar, it is not easy to seehow it can be defended. So long as it was a view about religious neutral-ity, its defense could be rooted in moral ideas-ideas deemed either tohave secular roots or to have a religious provenance commonly recog-nized by all the denominations among which neutrality was ordained.'But as soon as the ambit of neutrality was extended to encompass secularmorals, there was a danger of cutting the principle off from any possiblemoral foundation. One may say with Dworkin that liberalism ordainsneutrality "not because there is no right and wrong in political morality,but because that is what is right."6 But one has a hard time explainingwhy it is right and why the state should act on the basis of its moralrightness, if the doctrine itself requires the state to be neutral on ques-tions of morality.

For this and other reasons, liberal neutrality has been heavily criti-cized in the literature, and many critics assume that the idea is not onlyimplausible but incoherent.' Its dismissal out of hand, however, does notdo justice either to its historical roots or to the sense among many propo-nents that it captures at least something important about the liberal com-mitment to freedom. Certainly, neutrality is a slippery and paradoxicalformula. But until now the case against it lacked the sort of sustainedand detailed attention to levels of argument and presupposition necessaryto evaluate properly its claim to lie at the foundation of liberal thought.

3. The locus classicus of the utilitarian commitment to neutrality is the remark in J. BEN-

THAM, The Rationale of Reward, in II THE WORKS OF JEREMY BENTHAM 253 (J. Bowring ed.1838): "Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of musicand poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either." Cf J.S.MILL, UTILITARIANISM 257-63 (M. Wamok ed. 1962).

4. R. NOZICK, ANARCHY, STATE AND UTOPIA 33, 272-73 (1974); J. RAWLS, A THEORY OF

JUSTICE 94, 211-12, 327 (1971); cf Rawls, Fairness to Goodness, 84 PHIL. REv. 536, 539 (1975)(comparing morality and justice).

5. For examples of both types of argument, see J. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, inLOCKE: THE SECOND TREATISE OF GOVERNMENT AND A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION (J.

Gough ed. 1976).6. R. DWORKIN, supra note 1, at 203.7. See, ag., N. MACCORMICK, Against Moral Disestablishment, in LEGAL RIGHT AND

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY (1982) (a collection of MaeCormick's essays); Nagel, Rawls on Justice, inREADING RAWLS: CRITICAL STUDIES ON RAWLS' A THEORY OF JUSTICE 7-10 (N. Daniels ed.1975); Schwartz, Moral Neutrality and Primary Goods, 83 ETHICS 294 (1973); and the essays col-lected in LIBERAL NEUTRALITY (R. Goodin and A. Reeve eds. 1989) (publication forthcoming).

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B. RAz's CRITIQUE OF NEUTRALITY

Happily, that is no longer the case. In his new book, The Moralityof Freedom, Joseph Raz has embarked on a critical evaluation of neutral-ity in the context of a thorough and uncompromising revision of liber-alism's fundamental principles.'

Raz conducts his examination at exactly the le~el that is necessary.Like all his work, it eschews the impressionistic style that treats some-thing like liberalism as a state of mind to be captured in an airy phrase ortwo rather than as a body of theory that deserves detailed scrutiny.9 Overthe last ten years or so, the patient skill, insight into complexity, andunflagging commitment to argument that yielded Raz's invaluable con-ceptions of normativity and systematicity in law, have been focused onissues of political philosophy.' 0 The Morality of Freedom is the culmina-tion of that work, and it will contribute enormously to the impact thatRaz has already had on a generation of jurists and philosophers. He hasdiminished the gap between legal and political theory so that there is nowa much better sense of how issues of jurisprudence matter, and he haswidely advanced our understanding in precisely those areas of principleand value where easy slogans and fashionable equivocations are mostlikely to seduce political thinking.

It will become clear in this Article that much in Raz's account iscontroversial and that defenders of neutrality will want to take issue withmuch of it. But I hope I can also convey that it is Raz who has now setthe terms on which any argument about these questions must be con-ducted, and that Neil MacCormick was not exaggerating when he wrotein a recent review that The Morality of Freedom "is as significant a new

8. J. RAZ, THE MORALITY OF FREEDOM (1986).9. Roger Shiner suggests that Raz's book is a presentation of European (Rousseuian) liber-

alism rather than the United States variety. Shiner, Review of THE MORALITY OF FREEDOM, 63PHIL. 119, 121 (1988). But the book is not preoccupied with its provenance in this sense, and it lacksthe sort of airy allusion to the history of ideas that disfigures many recent critiques of liberalism inAmerican political theory.

10. See J. RAZ, THE AUTHORITY OF LAW: ESSAYS ON LAW AND MORALITY (1979). See alsoRaz, Autonomy, Toleration and the Harm Principle, in ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY LEGAL PHILOSO-PHY: THE INFLUENCE OF H.L.A. HART (R. Gavison ed. 1986); Raz, Right-Based Moralities, inTHEORIES OF RIGHTS (J. Waldron ed. 1984); Raz, On the Nature of Rights, 93 MIND 194 (1984)[hereinafter Raz, On the Nature of Rights]; Raz, Liberalism, Autonomy and the Politics of NeutralConcern, 7 MIDWEST STUD. PHIL. 89 (1982); Raz, Principles of Equality, 87 MIND 321 (1978).Though all these articles have been included in The Morality of Freedom, they have been adaptedinto the structure of a larger argument that makes that book much more than the sum of its parts.

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statement of liberal principles as anything since John Stuart Mill's OnLiberty.""

I have said that Raz's book is a comprehensive reworking of liberalargument. There will not be space in this (or any) article to do justice tothe full range of topics that he covers in the course of his discussion.

Two topics in particular bear much fuller examination. The openingchapters develop the arguments about authority, obedience, and fidelityto law first set out in his book The Authority of Law.12 Raz argues firmlythat the state can claim no authority over its citizens unless it can beshown that, by subjecting themselves to state authority, citizens are morelikely to act successfully for the reasons that apply to them than if theyacted on their own initiative.13 This argument, as we shall see, enablesRaz to sidestep the liberal worry that a non-neutral state might requirecitizens to pursue morally unjustified ideals. Such a requirement, Razargues, would lack authority quite apart from the issue of neutrality. 14

The Morality of Freedom also has two excellent chapters on how tounderstand the concept of individual rights. These chapters, located inthe middle of the book, present what has become known as the InterestTheory of rights, which builds on the so-called Benefit Theory set out byJeremy Bentham, and more recently, by David Lyons, and which Razand Neil MacCormick defended in earlier articles.15 I shall refer brieflyto this Interest Theory in considering the nature and importance of thecommitment that Raz thinks a liberal state should have to its citizens'personal autonomy. But there will not be space in this Article to argueas I have argued elsewhere that the Interest Theory provides the bestaccount we have of the language of rights in political philosophy.16

11. N. MaeCormick, Access to the Goods, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, (June 5, 1987, at599. The only book that comes remotely close to the complexity of Raz's discussion of these issues isV. HAKSAR, EQUALITY, LIBERTY AND PERFECTIONISM (1979).

12. See J. RAz, supra note 10. There is an excellent discussion in L. GREEN, THE AUTHORITYOF THE STATE (1988).

13. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 71.

14. See id. at 157-62.15. Bentham's view is discussed in H.L.A. HART, ESSAYS ON BENTHAM: STUDIES IN JURIS-

PRUDENCE AND POLITICAL THEORY (1982), chapters IV and VII. See also D. Lyons, Rights,Claimants and Beneficiaries, 6 AM. PHIL. Q. 173 (1969) (defining "right"). For the Interest Theory,see N. MacCormick, Rights in Legislation, in LAW MORALITY AND SOCIETY: ESSAYS IN HONOUROF H.L.A. HART 189 (P. Hacker and J. Raz eds. 1977); J. Raz, On the Nature of Rights, supra note10.

16. THEORIES OF RIGHTS 9-12 (J. Waldron ed. 1984); J. WALDRON, THE RIGHT TO PRIVATE

PROPERTY (1988), Ch. 3. I have discussed some difficulties in Raz's claims about the connectionbetween rights and individualism in Waldron, Can Communal Goods Be Human Rights?, 27ARCHIVES EUROPEENNES DE SOCIOLOGIE 296, 302-09 (1987).

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In this Article I want to concentrate on what I take to be the centralargument of The Morality of Freedom: Raz's critique of neutrality andthe case he makes for the alternative view that the state has a right, andperhaps even a duty, to promote valid ideals of the good. Raz labels theview he defends "perfectionism," a term used by John Rawls to pick outsubstantially the same position, and I shall follow him in that.17 But thejargon should not distract us: perfectionism is simply the view that legis-lators and officials may consider what is good and valuable in life andwhat is ignoble and depraved when drafting the laws and setting theframework for social and personal relationships.

In its bluntest terms, perfectionism is the doctrine set out in the Poli-tics of Aristotle: "the legislator must labour to ensure that his citizensbecome good men. 'He must therefore know what institutions will pro-duce this result, and what is the end or aim to which a good life isdirected."18 Though Raz emphatically denies (what Aristotle appears tosuggest) that there is some single criterion of the good life which thelegislator must uphold, 9 his perfectionism does involve the claim thatsome ways of life are simply morally worse than others and that the legis-lator's job is to discourage them.

Implicitly or explicitly, neutrality so dominates modem liberalismthat it is natural to think of perfectionism as an anti-liberal doctrine,based on values other than those such as individual freedom on whichliberals characteristically pride themselves. Thus, it would be natural toexpect Raz to defend his perfectionism by showing that individual libertydoes not matter as much as mainstream liberals have traditionally sup-posed. Natural, but mistaken. Raz addresses his book "primarily topeople who grew up in the embrace of the liberal tradition or who have atleast felt its attraction." 0 He aims not to abandon liberal principles, butrather to understand them in a way that enables us to see what they arerooted in and what exactly they imply.

To do this, he relates freedom to a deeper and richer ideal which hecalls "personal autonomy": the ideal of men and women being in largepart authors of their own lives. 21 Autonomy, he claims, lies at the heartof liberal morality. He argues that if it is properly understood, autonomyis not only compatible with perfectionism, but is based on a moral yearn-ing and is related to the social environment in a way that makes any

17. J. RAwLS, supra note 4, at 25.18. ARISTOTLE, THE POLITIcs 317 (E. Barker trans. 1958).19. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 133.20. Id. at 1.21. Id. at 370.

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principle of neutrality an insulting constraint on the way we organize oursociety. As Raz defends it, "[t]he autonomy principle permits and evenrequires governments to create morally valuable opportunities, and elimi-nate repugnant ones.",22

Since Raz's notion of autonomy is valuable in itself quite apart fromhis perfectionist argument, Part II of this Article outlines what itinvolves and its relation to more familiar ideas in the literature. Part IIIconsiders Raz's account of the conditions that are necessary if people areto be autonomous, including his account of the wrongness of coercionand manipulation. Part IV considers society's and, more particularly,the government's role in relation to these conditions. This Part involvesconsidering the various ways in which autonomy may be underminedand promoted; it will therefore give us our sense of the nature and limitsof Raz's commitment to perfectionism. Part IV also contains my maincriticisms of Raz's thesis. Part V concludes the Article with the sugges-tion that, although Raz's argument for perfectionism is flawed, at least hehas identified the proper ground on which mainstream liberals and theiropponents should discuss these matters.

II. AUTONOMY

A. THE CONCEPT OF LIBERTY

Everyone knows that liberals are committed to liberty, though somedeny that this is a constitutive liberal position.23 But liberty is a contestedconcept, the locus of much bitter argument in political philosophy. Onesails straight into controversy as soon as one leaves the safe haven ofanodyne formulas like: "On the whole, other things being equal, individ-ual liberty is a good thing."

Part of the controversy stems from the fact that some liberties seemmore important than others. Freedom of choice is important for sometypes of action, but does not seem to matter that much for other types ofaction. For example, freedom of religious worship seems to matter morethan freedom to drive my car in any direction I please along a cross-townavenue; the government therefore should be more reluctant to restrict thefirst freedom than the second.24 What are we to say about such distinc-tions? Do they arise because different liberties engage different values, so

22. Id. at 417.23. Cf. R. DWORKIN, supra note 1, at 188-91.24. See R. DWORKIN, TAKING RIGHTs SERIOUSLY 269-70 (1977).

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SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vo. 62:1097

that it is not libertyper se that is really important but rather these differ-ent values? Or is it that liberty is more at stake (or more liberty is atstake) in the first kind of case than the second?

Another part of the controversy concerns how liberty itself is under-stood. Liberals are often taken to be defenders of a "negative" concep-tion of liberty, in which liberty consists simply in the absence of certainrestraining conditions. To say that a person is free to do X says no morethan that no obstacles or restraints (of some specified type) stand in theway of doing X.25 But liberty defined purely in this negative way seemsodd and empty. It suggests that we simply value the absence of obstacleswithout valuing what may positively exist and thrive in the space that isleft when the obstacles are cleared away. The negative definition soundsoddly as though we have nothing affirmative to say about those values,and this oddness has led many people to favor a more "positive" concep-tion of freedom.26

A positive conception seems necessary anyway even for someonewho wants to focus only on restraints and impediments. For peopleexpound all sorts of claims about the things that make us "unfree." I amunfree to do X if someone deliberately restrains me physically from doingX. But what about foreseen but unintended constraints? Do they makeme unfree? What about constraints that I have been led to believe existwhich do not in fact exist? Do psychological constraints-fears and pho-bias-make me unfree? Does it make a difference how they were broughtabout? Does fear of penalties or sanctions make me unfree? (Hobbesthought the answer was "no," but if that is the case it is hard to get anygrip at all on the notion of political freedom.)27 Am I unfree when allthat is required of me is that if I do a certain action, I do it in a certainway (driving with a seat belt, for example)? If fear of penalties makes meunfree, can fear of destitution do the same? Are the poor free not to take

25. The classic conception of negative liberty is that of Thomas Hobbes. See T. HOBBES,LEVIATHAN 261 (C.B. Macpherson ed. 1968) ("Liberty, or Freedome, signifieth (properly) theabsence of Opposition; by Opposition, I mean external Impediments of motion").

26. The distinction between "negative" and "positive" conceptions of freedom is discussed in I.BERLIN, FOUR ESSAYS ON LIBERTY 118-72 (1969). The case against a purely negative conception isstated most cogently in Taylor, What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?, in THE IDEA OF FREEDOM:ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF ISAIAH BERLIN 175-93 (A. Ryan ed. 1979). Raz uses the term "positivefreedom" to refer to the background conditions (mental and physical capabilities, etc.) for the exer-cise of autonomy. See J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 408-09. But that is too restrictive. "Positive free-dom" is the name of a full-blooded conception of liberty (or family of conceptions). See, e.g.,G.W.F. HEGEL, PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT 105-08 (T.M. Knox ed. 1967).

27. T. HOBBES, supra note 25, at 262-63 ("Fear and Liberty are consistent .... And generallyall actions which men doe in Commonwealths, for fear of the law, [are] actions, which the doers hadliberty to omit.").

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minimum wage jobs if they have no other way to satisfy their needs andthose of their families? Am I free to refrain from something to whichthere is no rational alternative? Can ignorance make one unfree? And soon.

One of the lovely things about Raz's book is his insistence that it isfatuous to try to answer these questions by techniques of "linguistic anal-ysis.""z These questions arise precisely because there is no agreement onthe meaning of the word "freedom"; it is thus hopeless to appeal to itssettled meaning in order to answer them. Even if "freedom" had a set-tled definition allowing a pedant to say confidently, for example, that fearof penalties can make a person unfree even though fear of destitutioncannot, someone who disagreed could still suggest that we rewrite thedictionary to replace the offending term with one more sensitive to theunderlying moral analogy. The point is that we do not know how toanswer these questions until we know why freedom matters. Once wehave a grip on that, then we can ask how these various alleged impedi-ments relate in fact to the deep values supposedly at stake when talk offreedom is in the air.29

Clearly, none of the issues about freedom that I have outlined-thedifferent importance of different liberties, the emptiness of a purely nega-tive definition, and the controversies over what counts as a restraint-canbe dealt with adequately without a deeper investigation of what it is wevalue when we call for people to be free.

B. PERSONAL AUTONOMY

For Raz, the deeper value is personal autonomy: "The ideal of per-sonal autonomy is the vision of people controlling, to some degree, theirown destiny, fashioning it through successive decisions throughout theirlives."3 Autonomous people are, in a large part, the authors of theirlives in the sense that the shape and the direction of their lives can beexplained substantially in terms of the deliberate choices they have made:

28. See J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 15-16.29. For an excellent discussion of the limitations of linguistic analysis, see Miller, Linguistic

Philosophy and Political Theory, in THE NATURE OF POLITICAL THEORY 35-51 (D. Miller and L.Siedentop eds. 1983). As Raz recognizes, the approach taken in the text also makes nonsense of theclaim that a "value-neutral" definition of these terms can be given. See J. RAz, supra note 8, at 16.Cf. F. OPPENHEIM, POLITICAL CONCEPTS: A RECONSTRucrION I-2 (1981) (there is a need to haveexplicit definition of terms in order to discuss them even though definitions given may require devia-tions from ordinary language).

30. J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 369.

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His life is, in part, of his own making. The autonomous person's life ismarked not only by what it is but also by what it might have been andby the way it became what it is. A person is autonomous only if hehad a variety of acceptable options available to him to choose from,and his life became as it is through his choice of some of these options.A person who has never had any significant choice, or was not awareof it, or never exercised choice in significant matters but simply driftedthrough life is not an autonomous person. 31

Raz further adds the notion of "significant autonomy." Signifi-cantly autonomous persons are those who not only make choices but usetheir capacity for choice to "adopt personal projects, develop relation-ships, and accept commitments to causes, through which their personalintegrity and sense of dignity and self-respect are made concrete. ' 32 Byexercising their capacity for choice in this way, they define success andfailure in their lives and what is ultimately to be taken as making theirlives worth living.33

This account of autonomy resembles, and subtly improves upon,John Rawls' account of life plans and individual conceptions of the good.Rawls believes that "a person may be regarded as a human life livedaccording to a plan . . . [and that] an individual says who he is bydescribing his purposes and causes, what he intends to do in his life." '34

The main idea is that a person's good is determined by what is for himthe most rational long-term plan of life given reasonably favorable cir-cumstances .... We are to suppose, then, that each individual has arational plan of life drawn up subject to the conditions that confronthim. This plan is designed to permit the harmonious satisfaction of hisinterests. It schedules activities so that various desires can be fulfilledwithout interference. It is arrived at by rejecting other plans that areeither less likely to succeed or do not provide for such an inclusiveattainment of aims.35

Robert Nozick develops a similar conception. What is important aboutthe idea of a person, he says, is that it is the idea of

a being able to formulate long-term plans for its life, able to considerand decide on the basis of abstract principles or considerations it for-mulates to itself and hence not merely the plaything of immediatestimuli, a being that limits its own behavior in accordance with someprinciples or picture it has of what an appropriate life is for itself and

31. Id. at 204.32. Id. at 154.33. See id. at 387.34. J. RAwLs, supra note 4, at 408.35. Id. at 92-93.

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A UTONOMY AND PERFECTIONISM

others ... operating in terms of an overall conception of its life andwhat it is to add up to .... What is the moral importance of this...ability to form a picture of one's whole life (or at least of significantchunks of it) and to act in terms of some overall conception of the lifeone wishes to lead?... I conjecture that the answer is connected withthat elusive and difficult notion: the meaning of life. A person's shap-ing his life in accordance with some overall plan is his way of givingmeaning to his life; only a being with the capacity to so shape his lifecan have or strive for a meaningful life.36

The trouble with these suggestions as they stand is that the idea of livingone's life from beginning to end according to aplan seems both implausi-ble and unattractive. Diachronically, it underestimates the way peoplechange, and it puts lifestyle changes in a rather uncomfortable tensionwith autonomy. And even for a given moment or period of one's life, theaccount exaggerates the comprehensiveness of a single conception of thegood. We are simultaneously many things to ourselves and others, and itseems wildly implausible that a single scheme of values should order andrationalize everything we are, want to be, and want to do.

Almost alone among modem liberal philosophers, Raz has recog-nized the importance of these points. Though he talks of autonomouspeople as authors of their lives, Raz insists that "[tihe image this meta-phor is meant to conjure up is not that of the regimented, compulsiveperson who decides when young what life to have and spends the rest ofit living it out according to a plan."37 He warns against confusing auton-omy with "a rigid, planned life, lacking spontaneity and hostile to thepossibility of changing one's mind and dropping one pursuit to embraceanother."3 Nozick similarly recognizes that significant autonomy pre-supposes some diachronic perspective on one's life -"Our life comprisesthe pursuit of various goals, and that means it is sensitive to ourpast" 3 -but it does not require projects which are definitive of theworth of one's whole life, as opposed to projects that give one a sense ofwhat counts as success or failure for the time being." The link betweenchoice and autonomy, on the one hand, and personal identity, on theother, is always in danger of being exaggerated:

the ideal of personal autonomy is not to be identified with the ideal ofgiving one's life a unity .... The autonomous life may consist ofdiverse and heterogenous pursuits. And a person who frequently

36. R. NozicK, supra note 4, at 49-50.37. J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 370.38. Id. at 384.39. Id. at 387.40. There is an excellent account in S. HAMPSHIRE, THOUGHT AND AcTION 220-22 (1959).

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changes his tastes can be as autonomous as one who never shakes offhis adolescent preferences. 4 1

C. AUTONOMY AND NEEDS

Impatience with liberal talk of autonomy comes easily for the fol-lowing reason. Many people have neither the opportunity nor the leisureto contemplate the shape and direction of their lives; it is all they can doto keep themselves and their loved ones fed and housed, these are theconsiderations which determine most of their choices. That impatienceis important for any theory which proposes autonomy as an ideal forhumans, as opposed to the rather ethereal "persons" who populate thepages of so many works of political philosophy. One does not have to bea socialist to be reminded by one's "profane stomach" that, as Marx putit, "life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation,clothing" and so on.4 2

Raz takes seriously the role of personal needs in a theory of auton-omy. He recognizes that it is for need driven, rather than abstract,beings that autonomy is proposed as an ideal, and he develops a powerfulanalysis of how abject need and deprivation may undermine even theautonomy that is possible for beings with our nature.

The first point is responsible for Raz's rather careful formulationthat autonomous people are only in part or merely to some degree theauthors of their lives. No one can comprehensively determine her life, ifonly because life is always lived among others, and the choices othersmake, the options they establish, and the meanings they sustain affectwhat is available to any individual. But in addition, each individual hasinescapable basic functions requiring satisfaction, apart from whateverelse she wants to do. It is no derogation from either our freedom or ourautonomy that we must eat or even that we (or some of us) must work.Nor are these needs regrettable features of a "second-best" theory ofautonomy that would provide perfect freedom for angels. They are nec-essary incidents of the fact that autonomy is being proposed precisely forcreatures like us.43

Our potential for autonomy consists partly in our ability to deter-mine how we satisfy our needs-what to eat, where to live, what work toperform, and so on-and partly in the happy fact that, for some of us indeveloped societies, satisfying our needs does not consume all our time

41. J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 370-71.42. KARL MARX: SELECTED WRITINGS 148, 165 (D. McLellan ed. 1977).43. J. R.Az, supra note 8, at 155-56.

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and energy.' The satisfaction of our needs provides us with an array ofreasons for action no matter what we choose or want.45 But, as we shallsee in the next section, we are, on Raz's account, also capable of provid-ing ourselves with reasons for action by adopting goals in which theirpursuit might not contribute to our well-being but for our having chosenthem.46 I have a reason to eat, whether I choose to eat or not. But myreason for eating at Chez Pannisse rather than McDonald's derives frommy decision to pursue California's culinary delights, and my reason forgoing to the opera after dinner is a reason that may have no applicationwhatsoever to someone who has not cultivated such pursuits.

Satisfying basic needs is not only instrumentally important to thepursuit of our goals, it is also indispensable for our capacity to hold ourgoals autonomously. To embrace a goal autonomously is to be aware ofthe possibility of changing it. As Raz puts it, the satisfaction of basicneeds is "a precondition of one's ability rationally to adopt new goals andpursuits, and abandon existing ones."'47 From this, it follows that mate-rial deprivation can undermine autonomy as much as, say, coercion can:"The autonomous agent is one who is not always struggling to maintainthe minimum conditions of a worthwhile life."' 48 A person does notauthor her life, in Raz's sense, if the only choices she makes are thosenecessary to sustain life and the bare possibility of autonomy. Thesetypes of choices disclose nothing about the particular autonomous personshe might choose to be.

D. AUTONOMY AND MORAL CHOICE

What, then, is the nature of the particular choices that autonomyinvolves? Here Raz's thinking is at its most subtle and rewarding. Aperson lives an autonomous life by pursuing some goals rather thanothers and embracing some projects and relationships rather than others.Although one's pursuits and projects may change over time, one cannotchase every rainbow or fall in love with everyone. So how does an auton-omous person choose?

44. Raz is a little ambiguous on this point. Sometimes he talks about pursuits which gobeyond biologically determined needs, id. at 290. In other places, however, he suggests that even ourdistinctively autonomous pursuits involve the engagement of "innate drives" such as "drives to movearound, to exercise our bodies, to stimulate our senses, to engage our imagination and our affection,to occupy our mind." Id. at 375.

45. Id. at 290.46. Id. at 300.47. Id. at 297.48. Id. at 155.

1989) 1109



According to Raz, the ideal of personal autonomy must steer acourse between the Scylla of something like existentialism and the Cha-rybdis of moral rigorism. He rejects views which "[exaggerate auton-omy] into a doctrine of arbitrary self-creation based on the belief that allvalue derives from choice which is itself not guided by value and is there-fore free, i.e. arbitrary."'49 To a certain extent, the merits of various alter-natives and the reasons in their favor can be determined independently ofanyone's choice, and in this sense values can be impersonal." But achoice which is nothing but a response to the weight of impersonal moralreasons is not, according to Raz, an exercise of personal autonomy:

Autonomy requires a choice of goods. A choice between good and evilis not enough. (Remember that it is personal, not moral, autonomy weare concerned with. No doubt is cast on the fact that [a person choos-ing good over evil] is a moral agent and fully responsible for hisactions. So are the inmates of concentration camps. But they do nothave personal autonomy.) 51

When we face a choice between things more valuable and less valuable,of course it is important that we choose the former. But in so choosingwe do not disclose ourselves or our individuality in the special way we dowhen we choose between options that are good.

Raz's middle course between rigorism and existentialism involvesthree elements. The first is a happy fact about value. There is no onegood way to live one's life; modem circumstances provide many wayswhich cannot all be pursued in a single life. The second element con-cerns our choice of one (or more) of these ways of life over others: whatmatters is not that at the time we choose, our selection be fully articulateand rationally defensible on impersonal grounds, but rather that we seeourselves as having reasons now for the choices we have made and con-tinue to embrace. Some of those reasons will be impersonal ones thatwould have counted in favor of the choice at the outset; but some, andthis is the third point, will be reasons the choice itself spawns, reasonsthat would not exist but for our having chosen as we did.

49. Id. at 387-88.50. As I read Raz, this impersonality of value does not necessarily imply any thesis of realism

in meta-ethics. Certainly Raz repudiates the sort of skepticism that denies that any choice is everany better from a moral point of view than any other. Id. at 160. But anti-realism no more commitsone to this than to any other first order view in ethics, nor is it at all incompatible with the claim thatsome of the reasons in favor of one's pursuit of some project may not be dependent on the fact thatone has chosen it. For a sophisticated exploration of the options here, see S. BLACKBURN, RuleFollowing and Moral Realism, in WITTGENSTEIN: To FOLLOW A RULE 163-87 (S. Holtzman & C.Leich eds. 1981). Raz cites Blackburn's account of second order goals with approval. J. RAZ, supranote 8, at 294 n.l.


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The first point, moral pluralism, lies at the heart of Raz's account ofmorality. Warnings are often issued against any easy assumption thateverything good in life can fit into a coherent scheme. Isaiah Berlin, forexample, maintains that "not all good things are compatible, still less allthe ends of mankind," and he regards the denial of pluralism as the basisof moral totalitarianism, and that denial as more responsible than anyother belief "for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the greathistorical ideals."52 But Raz sees that there is more to be said aboutpluralism. Even if the ends of life are mutually incompatible, that incom-patibility does not excuse political philosophy from providing a coherentaccount of how the state should respond to the truth (including the plu-ralistic truth) about value.

He recognizes, for example, that it makes a difference whether thevarious ways of living a good life seriously rival one another. Differentpursuits may emphasize some abilities and virtues and exclude others.Indeed, it is possible that cultivating the abilities and virtue required forcertain (morally worthy) ways of life might actually dispose one towardimpatience and intolerance of the abilities and virtues required for others.For example, committee types who are excellent at getting things doneare often impatient with single-minded devotion to a cause.53 Or, thevirtues of universal philanthropy may make a person contemptuous ofthe skills involved in maintaining a comfortable family life. If any of thisis correct, we cannot assume the morally good person's tolerance ofothers who also lead morally good lives. Our theory of toleration willhave to become more complicated and sensitive to take account of thediversity and competitiveness which exist among rival and incompatibleways of living life well.54

Raz's moral pluralism is spelled out in terms of incommensurability.Certain options, pursuits, and careers are widely thought incomparablewith one another in terms of value. As Raz points out, "[P]eople arelikely to refuse to pronounce on the comparative value of a career inteaching and in dentistry. They deny the comparability of playing amusical instrument and cycling to visit old churches as pastimes, etc.""Their refusal does not always mean that the options are equally valuablenor that we cannot tell which is more valuable; it sometimes means thatcomparing the options in terms of value is simply out of place, and thatincompatible options A and B may both be good for reasons a single

52. I. BERLIN, supra note 26, at 167.53. 3. RAz, supra note 8, at 406.54. See id. at 401-07.55. Id. at 336.

1989] IIII



person can recognize and yet neither option be better than the other.5 6

Moreover, the fact that people do choose between options does not beliethis refusal to make comparisons; choice may be revealed preferencewithout necessarily being the revelation of comparative judgment. 57

Indeed, we simply do not know enough about how options are cho-sen in real life to say anything much about the evaluative processeswhich choice necessarily implies. A recurring theme in Raz's book is therejection of what he calls "over-intellectualized conceptions of auton-omy." 8 Though he defines autonomy to contrast with "drifting throughlife without ever exercising one's capacity to choose,"5 9 he concedes thatmany of the most important things in our lives, rather than being con-sciously chosen, may be projects we have grown up with and aspirationswe discover when we first autonomously deliberate.6 0 What matters forautonomy is not so much the genesis of our projects and aspirations, but,first, that we recognize the possibility now of abandoning them or contin-uing to embrace them; second, that when we choose among these options,we do so for reasons that play a conscious role in our continuing practi-cal deliberations; and third, that we identify in good faith with thechoices we have made." Parents may have begun nurturing their chil-dren's musical talent long before they became capable of autonomousdeliberation; but the latter's pursuit of a musical career still counts asautonomous if, aware of the alternatives, they later embrace consciouslyand wholeheartedly the course of life on which their parents set them.Autonomous people regard themselves as having reasons for the goalsthey pursue. But, as Raz puts it, this need have little to do with the wayone comes by one's goals; it has everything to do with the way one holdsthem now.

62

56. Raz's formal definition of incommensurability is in fact slightly stronger than this andinvolves a limitation on transitivity as a condition on rational choice: "Two valuable options areincommensurable if (1) neither is better than the other, and (2) there is (or could be) another optionwhich is better than one but is not better than the other." Id. at 325.

57. Id. at 338.58. Id. at 371.59. Id.60. Id. at 290-91.61. This third point defines Raz's notion of integrity. See id. at- 383-85. If we say that keeping

faith with one's choices involves a readiness consciously to deploy the reasons that inform themelsewhere in one's practical life, id. at 291, then one can start to see an oblique relation betweenRaz's notion of integrity in personal life and Ronald Dworkin's notion of integrity as a systemicinterpretive virtue in jurisprudence. Cf. R. DWORKIN, LAW's EMPIRE 176-224 (1986).


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This brings us to the point about personal and impersonal reasons.Finding that one has a developed talent (such as a trained musical abil-ity) provides a reason for continuing to nurture that talent. Often, thecourse that one has embarked upon provides reasons for continuing onthat course that were not the reasons for embarking on it in the firstplace. Raz's work has always embodied a special sensitivity to the struc-ture of practical reasoning and the layered relations between reasons atdifferent levels.63 Here that sensitivity provides insight into the texture ofa person's embracing a lifestyle:

The emerging picture is of interplay between impersonal, i.e.,choice-independent reasons which guide the choice, which then itselfchanges the balance of reasons and determines the contours of thatperson's well-being by creating new reasons which were not therebefore. This interplay of independent value and the self-creation ofvalue by one's actions and one's past provides the clue to the role ofthe will in practical reasoning.... Saying "I want to.. ." can be a wayof indicating that one is committed to a project, that one has embraceda certain pursuit, cares about a relationship. It is, in the wayexplained, part of a valid reason for action, once the initial commit-ment has been made.64

Thus autonomous choice can be creative as well as moral, since an agentconstitutes a new array of reasons to act by choosing one way rather thananother. In this way, and in the way it builds on itself, making a series ofautonomous choices becomes a mode of self-disclosure, for someone'sidentity in the practical sphere is partly defined by what counts in thatperson's choices about what to do and what to be.

Raz's theory provides a detailed account of something that hasotherwise only been hinted at in recent critiques of liberalism. MichaelSandel is famous for arguing that the theories of Rawls and other liberalspresuppose an image of the self that stands at a certain distance fromwhatever interests it has. The liberal self is independent of its commit-ments in at least the sense that it can reconsider them without calling itsown existence in question:

One consequence of this distance is to put the self beyond the reach ofexperience, to make it invulnerable, to fix its identity once and for all.No commitment could grip me so deeply that I could not understandmyself without it. No transformation of life purposes and plans couldbe so unsettling as to disrupt the contours of my identity. No project

63. .See J. RAz, PRACTICAL REASON AND NORMS 35-45 (1975), for the notion of exclusionaryreasons as an explication of normativity.

64. J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 389.

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could be so essential that turning away from it would call into questionthe person I am.65

Like much talk about identity and ontology in political theory,Sandel's position is exaggerated and ill thought out. The ontologicalsense in which we as individuals might be understood as "whollydetached from our aims and attachments,16 6 has nothing to do with howour projects grip us or the extent of our commitment to them. Liberalsmay deny that a commitment makes a difference to our essential being, insome suitably uninteresting metaphysical sense, while conceding, as Razshows, that a commitment makes all the difference in the world to ourreasons for action, the hierarchy of our goals, and the way we pictureourselves in practical life. Moreover, Raz shows how our commitmentscan make this difference without blinding ourselves to the role thatchoice plays in our embracing them and without stunting that part of ourimagination which modulates our most fervent commitments with thethought that we could always revise them if we chose.

This part of the Article has attempted to indicate the depth andsubtlety of autonomy as Raz understands it. Though his arguments arecomplicated and often difficult, what emerges is a conception that ishumane rather than severe. Unlike much modem philosophy which con-nects an analytical style with a forbiddingly abstract content, Raz'saccount of autonomy recognizes the messy reality of concrete choicesabout life and work and love. He takes seriously the view that liberalpolitics must rest on a distinctive and articulate account of moral choiceand value, and he provides such an account. The difficulties begin onlywhen he attempts to build a politics on that basis.

III. THE CONDITIONS FOR AUTONOMY

A. AUTONOMY AS CAPACITY

Others cannot make my autonomous choices for me.68 But they canmake a difference as to whether I am capable of making these choicesmyself. Raz notices that "autonomy" is used sometimes in the sense ofan achievement, sometimes in the sense of a capacity. In the former

65. M. SANDEL, LIBERALISM AND THE LIMITS OF JUSTICE 62 (1982).66. M. SANDEL, Introduction, in LIBERALISM AND ITS CRmcs 5 (M. Sandel ed. 1984).67. See also Waldron, When Justice Replaces Affection: The Need for Rights, 11 HARV. J.L. &

PUB. POL'Y 625, 646-47 (1988).

68. See J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 407.

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sense, people are autonomous if their lives are largely of their own mak-ing, in the way that we have already discussed. In the latter sense, call-ing people autonomous means only that they can determine the course oftheir lives if they want, and that they live in an environment where self-determination is possible. Many people lead lives which are not autono-mous despite their capacity for autonomy. Raz believes that the secondsense derives from the first: we define the capacity by seeing what wouldbe involved in the achievement. And he believes that only the achieve-ment is of ultimate value: it is "the value of the exercise which endowsthe capacity with what it is worth."6 9

Still "one cannot exercise an ability one does not possess,"' 70 and wemust ask what is requisite for people to have this capacity. Among theseveral conditions required, some pertain to the individual and some tothe environment in which options are presented and endowed with moralmeaning. 71 The individual attributes are fairly straightforward and neednot detain us here. They include cognitive abilities "such as the power toabsorb, remember and use information," emotional and imaginativecapacities, character traits like "stability, loyalty and the ability to formpersonal attachments and to maintain intimate relationships," and ofcourse basic health and physical well-being. 72 As we shall see shortly,the idea is not that the lack of any of these attributes prevents a personfrom living the autonomous life; rather the idea is that we value each ofthese things partly (indeed substantially) for their contribution to theautonomous life.

B. COERCION AND DEPRIVATION

A second set of conditions recalls traditional ideas about freedom.Obviously, one cannot be autonomous if one's decisions make no differ-ence to what happens in one's life. Imprisoned people can contemplatechoices and nominate options all they like but these decisions will notmake much difference on how they live if they cannot move about,

69. Id. at 372.70. Id.71. One of the themes to which I cannot do justice in this Article is Raz's explication of the

social dimension to individual freedom. In his account of the relation between individual and collec-tive goods, see J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 198, and in his account of the way in which individual optionsare endowed with social meaning, see id. at 307-13, 348-57, he does much to diminish the fashionablecontrast between liberal and "communitarian" approaches to political morality.


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choose their company, follow outdoor pursuits and so on. Negative free-dom, in the brute Hobbesian sense, is an indispensable condition forautonomy.73

Freedom from coercion is a much more complicated idea. Raznotices, quite rightly, that if someone threatens to harm me unless I do asordered, there is still a sense in which I make a choice: "[T]he coercedprefer to comply with the threat and avoid the penalty. The coerced mayregret the circumstances they are in, but so do many people who facehard unpleasant choices."'74 So what is wrong with coercion? How doesit undermine autonomy? And what distinguishes situations that arecoercive from those that are not?

Suppose someone threatens to break my fingers unless I make a cer-tain choice. If the threat is credible, my choice lacks autonomy presuma-bly for the same reason that any choice dominated by the need topreserve the basic integrity of one's body lacks autonomy. This insightprovides the basis of an important connection between the view (com-monly held by "negative" libertarians) that threats undermine freedomand the view (commonly reviled by negative libertarians) that povertyundermines freedom. Raz properly argues that the two views stand orfall together.75

In addition, Raz points out that threats that go beyond biologicalneeds can coerce us. For example, threatening to break someone's fin-gers is especially significant to concert pianists, for although we all havereasons not to have our fingers broken, pianists have a special reasonderived from the way they shaped their lives. A career aspiration likepiano playing may occupy such a high position in the hierarchy of aperson's goals 76 that losing her fingers may make a worthwhile lifeimpossible. Therefore, it is also presumably true that threats to deprivepeople of something required for the pursuit of their life projects consti-tutes coercion even if that something has nothing to do with their biolog-ical needs. Threatening to smash a sculptor's nearly completed life workmight be one example. And since "projects" embraces relationships,threatening harm to a loved one can also undermine one's autonomy. 77

73. T. HOBBES, supra note 25.74. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 151.75. Id. at 156.76. See id. at 292-93.77. See id. at 153.

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Coercion also has significance for autonomy that goes beyond itsimpact on the circumstances of its victims' lives. Coercion, being inten-tional, involves an element of insult: The victim is "being treated as anon-autonomous agent, an animal, a baby, or an imbecile. ' 78 Raz's workis much more sensitive to issues of hermeneutics than is most liberal the-ory: Meaning and significance are determined for actions and practicesat a social, rather than an individual, level. 9 It is thus possible for athreat to constitute disrespect for autonomy even when it does not signifi-cantly diminish it:

The natural fact that coercion and manipulation reduce options or dis-tort normal processes of decision and the formation of preferences hasbecome the basis of a social convention loading them with meaningregardless of their actual consequences. They have acquired a sym-bolic meaning expressing disregard or even contempt for the coercedor manipulated people.80

This, as we shall see, is important for Raz's later explication of the liberalopposition to the use of coercion in pursuit of perfectionist ideals.

C. MANIPULATION

Raz draws a distinction in meaning-but not in significance-between coercion and manipulation. Coercion reduces options by delib-erately associating unbearable costs with options that are otherwiseattractive to a person. Manipulation also interferes with one's choicesbut, according to Raz, without affecting one's options: "Instead it per-verts the way that person reaches decisions, forms preferences or adoptsgoals." 81

For reasons I cannot fathom, Raz deems it unnecessary to say any-thing more about the nature of manipulation. We are told that it inter-feres with autonomy, as does coercion, that it can be endowed with asocial meaning beyond its consequential impact, and that its use in poli-tics should be restricted as the use of coercion is. 82 But Raz's account ofthe way manipulation affects autonomy is far less detailed than theaccount he gives of coercion. He simply tells us puzzlingly that, whilemanipulation invades autonomy in a way that is "unlike coercion," 83 itinterferes with autonomy "in much the same way and to the same

78. Id. at 156.79. See supra note 71.80. J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 378.81. Id. at 377-78.82. Id. at 420.83. Id. at 377.

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degree."" 4 This unclarity is unfortunate for the evaluation of Raz'sperfectionism. For when he maintains that the state may pursue perfec-tionist policies non-coercively,8 5 one suspects that some of the misgivingsamong mainstream liberals will focus on the manipulative character ofthe state's "promotion" of morality.

But that is jumping ahead to Part IV of this Article. For now, weshould ask, "What might manipulation involve that makes it an invasionof autonomy?" One answer is that it may interfere with the mental anddecisional capacities that autonomy requires.8" Artificial limits on pow-ers of reasoning or imagination imposed specifically to make a personmore likely to choose a certain option make it hard to say that a choice isindeed this person's choice rather than of the person doing themanipulating.

The difficulty of course lies in deciding what is artificial and what isnot, what is a way of limiting the imagination and what is a way ofexpanding it. We can see this difficulty if we consider some of the moreradical definitions of "manipulation" given in the literature on power.Steven Lukes, in his critique of behaviorist methods in political science,argues, for example:

A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does notwant to do, but he also exercises power over him by influencing, shap-ing or determining his very wants. Indeed, is it not the supreme exer-cise of power to get another or others to have the desires you wantthem to have-that is, to secure their compliance by controlling theirthoughts and desires? 7

The conceptual difficulty with this critique is that in order to applyit, we must have some counterfactual sense of how a person's thoughtsand preferences would have developed but for the intervention of themanipulating person. Developing this sense may be impossible withoutcircularity if the counterfactual itself refers to manipulation (e.g., "WhatB would have preferred if B had not been subject to manipulation").Developing this sense is certainly very difficult for a theory which, likeRaz's, holds that the reasons which make a preference autonomous maystem from the fact that the preference has been adopted, rather than theother way round.

84. Id. at 420.85. Id. at 417.86. Id. at 407-08.87. S. LuKEs, POWER: A RADICAL VIEW 23 (1974).

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That last point bears expanding. Under Raz's theory, people's goals(and thus their preferences and their sense of what constitutes their well-being) can hardly be chosen utterly independently of others. Parentsinstill aspirations in their children, lovers thrust projects upon oneanother, and society as a whole makes certain options available andothers unavailable. What matters for autonomy is not that we hold ourgoals independently of others, but that we currently embrace them forreasons that appeal to us using our own evaluative capacities. Those rea-sons may include impersonal ones that would or should appeal to usindependently of others' having given us these goals; but, as we haveseen, they need not. One's only reasons for embracing a goal may bereasons that derive entirely from its original adoption, and its adoptionmay be nothing but the result of others' intervention in one's life. Givenhis boot-strapping conception of goals and reasons, Raz simply cannotafford to regard this as manipulation.

The same point can be made more generally about the conditions forautonomy. One does not develop one's capacity for autonomy "natu-rally" or in isolation. The social environment generally and one's inter-action with others are going to affect it. Some of those interactions maybe deliberate, others may not. But deliberateness surely cannot be themorally relevant distinction, for we want people to affect one another inways that are designed to enhance one another's capacities to choose.

Notice that Raz will not want to say that affecting a person's capaci-ties counts as manipulation just in case it increases the likelihood thatperson will make bad choices. That would be too easy. Raz wants tobanish manipulation as well as coercion even in the service of enlightenedperfectionist ideals.88 It follows that we must at least be able to imaginecases where people are manipulated to choose options that are good andwhere that still counts as a derogation from their autonomy.

I think that in the end Raz will want to settle for a fairly modestidea of manipulation which involves something as simple as the inculca-tion of false beliefs. People have hierarchies of goals, so that they pursuesome goals because of a belief about their connection with others: I writethis Article only because I believe it will contribute to the discussion ofRaz's book. If someone leads me to adopt that belief, knowing it to befalse, in order to get me to write the Article, then I am beingmanipulated.


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But even this idea, of the inculcation of true and false beliefs, is farfrom straightforward in a social and political context. If I contributedeliberately to the symbolic loading of some option (for example, if Ipropose or support the establishment of some faith as the official Englishreligion), am I misleading people about what it is to be English or patri-otic? Am I manipulating people's choice of religion? Any affirmativeanswer seems to presuppose that there is such a thing as an option's "realmerits" apart from the social meaning with which it has been endowed.And that presupposition seems naive given the rest of Raz's theory. Butif my behavior is not manipulation, then loading toothpaste with a con-notation of sex appeal is not manipulation either, and it becomes hard tosee what work the concept is doing.

D. THE AVAILABILITY OF OPTIONS

According to Raz the conditions of autonomy are threefold: first,"the mental abilities to form intentions of a sufficiently complex kind,and plan their execution"; second, freedom from coercion and manipula-tion; and third, the availability to the agent of an adequate range ofoptions.9 Since autonomy is good, Raz believes everyone has a duty topromote all three conditions.

This Article leaves the third of these conditions until last because itraises special problems about the nature of autonomy as an ideal.

Raz believes that respect for autonomy requires society to ensurethat we face an array of significant choices in our lives:

They should include options with long term pervasive consequences aswell as short term options of little consequence .... We should be ableboth to choose long term commitments or projects and to develop last-ing relationships and be able to develop and pursue them by meanswhich we choose from time to time. It is intolerable that we shouldhave no influence over the choice of our occupation or of ourfriends .... To be autonomous and to have an autonomous life, aperson must have options which enable him to sustain throughout hislife activities which, taken together, exercise all the capacities humanbeings have an innate drive to exercise, as well as to decline to developany of them.90

In an intriguing passage Raz argues that the pervasive and compre-hensive goals in people's lives will not be options they can create for

89. Id. at 372-73.90. Id. at 374-75. For this notion compare supra note 44 (even distinctively autonomous pur-

suits involve the engagement of "innate drives").

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A UTONOMY AND PERFECTIONISM

themselves; they will have to be socially constituted (like forms of mar-riage, friendship, political participation, or the structure of a profession).Goals that are dense and pervasive are things with which we becomefamiliar only through experience, and the only forms of experience opento us are social.9 1 Thus, if there is a duty to make it possible for people tolive autonomously, the duty must have collective and social aspects in itscontent and character. As we shall see, this is the basis of Raz's viewthat morality cannot be understood in exclusively individualistic terms.92

There are social duties to make options available for autonomy onlybecause autonomy is independently desirable. But there will be somewho deny that autonomy, as Raz understands it, is desirable; they believethat people are better off living in traditional social forms without thesense that they can choose what direction or trajectory their lives willfollow. Much recent "communitarian" thought presents itself as nostal-gia for lost innocence and views the possibility and the exercise of auton-omy as a curse, rather than a blessing, of modem society.93 Raz believesthat this view is wrong, and that in modem society autonomy is valuablefor each individual, whether that individual recognizes and embraces itas an ideal or not. He argues against "applying autonomy to itself" sothat it becomes valuable for a person only if that person chooses it.94

Raz seems to argue, however, that autonomy's value is contingentrather than unconditional. Autonomy is valuable for us (whether we likeit or not) only because of the sort of society in which we live:

For those who live in an autonomy-supporting environment there is nochoice but to be autonomous: there is no other way to prosper in sucha society .... The value of personal autonomy is a fact of life. Sincewe live in a society whose social forms are to a considerable extentbased on individual choice, and since our options are limited by what isavailable in our society, we can prosper in it only if we can be success-fully autonomous.

95

Life in a traditional society is not available to anyone in the modemworld, though pockets approximating it can be created artificially. Still,creating, sustaining, and participating in such communities can itself be

91. See id. at 310-12.

92. See id. at 198-209.93. See A. MACINTYRE, WHICH JUSTICE? WHOSE RATIONALITY? (1988); A. MACINTYRE,

AFTER VIRTUE: A STUDY IN MORAL THEORY (1981); M. SANDEL, supra note 65; M. SANDEL,supra note 66; C. TAYLOR, Atomism, in POwERS, POSSESSIONS AND FREEDOM: ESSAYS IN HONOR

OF C.B. MACPHERSON (A. Kontos ed. 1979).

94. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 390-91.95. Id. at 391, 394..

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understood only as an individual choice. Raz even points out that thosewho see the importance of autonomy in modem society by no meanscommit themselves to thinking it is a good thing:

It would be a mistake to think that those who believe, as I do, inthe value of personal autonomy necessarily desire the extension of per-sonal choice in all relationships and pursuits. They may consistentlywith their belief in personal autonomy wish to see an end to this pro-cess, or even its reversal.96

The situation is analogous to the relation between justice and scar-city (or courage and danger). If there were no scarcity, there would beno place for considerations of justice, and if there were no danger, therewould be no call for the virtue of courage. As things stand and are likelyto remain for any plausible future we can imagine, justice and couragewill continue to be important. The importance of these virtues, however,is no reason for promoting or perpetuating the circumstances that makethem desirable; the virtue of courage does not justify creating danger, nordoes the importance of justice warrant perpetuating scarcity.97 Theworry that I have about Raz's position lies in his derivation of the duty toprovide options for the exercise of autonomy. If autonomy is morallyvaluable only because of the sort of options we have in modem society,then the importance of autonomy is no more a reason to promote or evensustain the options that exist than the virtue of justice is a reason to resistthe abolition of scarcity. The availability of options has to be seen, onRaz's account, as one of "the circumstances of autonomy." 98 That thosecircumstances may change is not deplorable or regrettable on the basis ofthe importance of autonomy, for the fact that they change may have animpact on the actual importance of autonomy.

I should add that none of the above would follow if one were toabandon Raz's coyness and say simply that autonomy is unequivocallygood and that the growth of the social circumstances that make it bothpossible and important is to be celebrated unconditionally as one of theadvances of modem life. It would then be true that we would have dutiesderived from the value of autonomy to sustain the environment thatmakes its exercise possible. I find that position more attractive, but itseems to go beyond the limits of Raz's enthusiasm for modernist versions

96. Id. at 394.97. These points are made powerfully in M. SANDEL, supra note 65, at 28-35.98. Analogous to what Rawls describes as "the circumstances of justice." J. RAWLs, supra

note 4, at 126.

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of liberalism.99

E. Is THERE A RIGHT TO AUTONOMY?

Though he believes autonomy is important, Raz denies that it issomething to which individuals have a right. As noted earlier, this Arti-cle will not go deeply into Raz's conception of rights.1" But Raz offers auseful definition: a person has a right to X only if that person's interestin having X is sufficiently important in itself to warrant holding others tobe under a duty to promote it.101

His doubts about a putative right to autonomy stem from the natureof the duties involved. We have seen that many of the things that makeautonomy possible are collective goods, for example, the existence ofsocial practices, professions, or supportive environment. Raz argues thatbecause creating and sustaining social practices imposes a collective bur-den which would have to be shouldered by almost everyone, it is unlikelythat mandating such practices as a duty can be justified on the basis ofthe interest of any single individual. "Assuming that the interest of oneperson cannot justify holding so many to be subject to potentially bur-densome duties ... it follows that there is no right to personal auton-omy."I 2 Notice that the argument does not show that there are no suchduties, nor that they are unimportant; it purports to show only that theyare not right-based.

Even so, the argument is flawed for three reasons. First, it does notfollow that because some of the duties required to promote an individ-ual's autonomy are too burdensome to be based on the interests of thatindividual alone, that all of them are too burdensome. X has a duty notto coerce or manipulate Y, for example, and that duty is not particularlyburdensome. Since under Raz's analysis that duty is based on Y's inter-est in autonomy, it follows that Y has a right to autonomy. Simplybecause that right might not capture everything we want to say aboutautonomy does not show it is not a right.

Second, it is disputable whether the duties Raz talks about really areas burdensome as he suggests. In order for me to be autonomous, others

99. Right at the end of the book, Raz seems a little less hesitant about autonomy. As he dis-cusses the problem of immigrant or religious communities that do not support autonomy, he impliesthat, although their members may have "an adequate and satisfying life," still we can assume that"their culture is inferior to that of the dominant liberal society in the midst of which they live." J.RAz, supra note 8, at 423.

100. J. Raz, supra note 8, at 166.101. Id. at 247.102. Id.

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must sustain a certain sort of social environment. But sustaining thatenvironment is a good to them apart from any autonomy related justifica-tion, and it is this fact that may make the duty less burdensome notwith-standing that, to the extent that the duty is a duty, it is imposed on themto serve my interest in autonomy. I could not choose to be an artistunless there were a social practice of art; but far from being burdensome,the sustenance of that practice mostly arises from others happily makingthis same sort of choice. 103

The third point is more difficult. Raz says that we should regard aduty as right-based only if our reason for holding others to be under thatduty concerns the importance of the -interest of some individual consid-ered on its own. This definition has the advantage of distinguishingbetween right-based and utilitarian duties. The latter are imposed onlyon the basis of a calculation of aggregate interest. Intermediate, how-ever, are those duties imposed because an interest is common to all indi-viduals. An interest is common if all individuals have it. Most of theinterests corresponding to what we call human rights are like this, andso, according to Raz, is the individual interest in autonomy. In politics,the intriguing thing about common interests is that the individual inter-ests of a whole set of individuals may be served by the existence of asingle social institution or practice. The single institution of representa-tive democracy serves the interest that we all have in common with eachother of being able to participate in the choice of leaders and policy. Thesingle institution of the FBI serves the interest that each U.S. citizen hasin common with every other in being protected from certain forms ofcrime. Of course, no one would set up a democracy or a police force justbecause of the interest of one person; nevertheless, these institutions (andthe duty to sustain them) are rationalized on the basis of individual inter-ests taken one by one, not aggregated in a utilitarian way. If dutiesimposed on this sort of basis cannot be regarded as right-based, then wemust exclude almost all of what we think of as political rights from theambit of Raz's definition.

The Morality of Freedom is clearly a book that has been written inlayers."° Despite Raz's argument that I have just been criticizing-thatduties to promote autonomy are not right-bised because they are notbased in the individual interest in autonomy-he talks quite happily later

103. Cf. Reaume, Individuals, Groups, and Rights to Public Goods, 38 U. TORONTO L.J. 1(1988) (considering whether an individual's interest in a cultured society can justify imposing a dutyon others to create such a society); see also Waldron, supra note 16, at 305-06 ("[Pleople enjoyparticipating in the production of a cultured society.").

104. See supra note 10.

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in the work about "autonomy-based duties." 105 Since he believes that"our concern for autonomy is a concern to enable people to have a goodlife,"' 1 6 and that any duty to promote autonomy "arises out of people'sinterest in having a valuable autonomous life,"1"7 it follows that (if weaccept his conception of rights) people do have a right to autonomy.

F. MORAL INDIVIDUALISM

There is a deeper point at the back of all this. Raz is anxious todiscredit what he calls "moral individualism": the view that collectivegoods have only instrumental value and never any intrinsic value of theirown. He is able to do this fairly easily by showing that the existence andavailability of certain social options and of a certain sort of social envi-ronment is valuable, not just as a means to autonomy, but as part of whatautonomy consists in. The conclusion is that "the ideal of personalautonomy is incompatible with moral individualism."' 8

But the argument is far too quick. Raz's notion of a collective goodis flawed, and his conception of moral individualism captures little thathas ever been involved in debates on that subject.

The idea of a collective good, according to Raz, is that of an "inher-ent public good"-that is, a good that is non-excludable and non-contin-gently so. 10 9 It is not necessarily true that if a good is non-excludable anaccount of its value is not exhausted by an account of its value to individ-uals. Clean air is non-excludable, but still it is a good simply to individu-als, for air is individually breathed. Non-excludability concerns theconditions under which a good is supplied; it has nothing whatever to dowith the basis of its value. Moreover, it is not clear that the non-exclud-ability being non-contingent makes any difference to the basis of its value:the modality cannot alter the fact that excludability is a point about sup-ply, not about the basis of value.

It is true that some goods are genuinely communal, in the sense thatthey are good for communities in a way that is not captured by anyaccount of their value to individuals. The good of a particular sharedlanguage is an example.' 10 But it would be odd to talk about non-exclud-ability, contingent or otherwise, as a (defining) feature of such goods,

105. J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 408.106. Id. at 412.107. Id. at 418.108. Id. at 206.109. See id. at 198-99.110. See Waldron, supra note 16, at 309-13.

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since non-excludability is a concept that concerns the way a good is sup-plied to individuals, and supply to individuals is precisely not the issue forcommunal goods. In any case, Raz does nothing to establish that talk ofautonomy presupposes goods that are communal in this further sense.

With regard to his own conception of "collective" goods (such as itis), the most that Raz establishes is that these goods have some intrinsicvalue. But "intrinsic value" is a very broad category for Raz. It includesnot only (1) things good in themselves, but also (2) things which areelements of things good-in themselves and which contribute to the valueof the latter.I' Intrinsic goods in category (2)-what Raz calls "constit-uent goods"-are worth having only on account of the existence of thegoods whose value they help to supplement. We cannot explain the valueof a constituent good by considering it in itself; we must appeal to theultimate good which in part comprises the constituent whose value is inquestion.

These definitions are perfectly acceptable. But then Raz goes on todefine "moral individualism" as the view that no collective good has anyintrinsic value. Given Raz's broad understanding of intrinsic value, thisdefinition is simply a caricature. It means that the following propositionis not an expression of moral individualism: "The worth of everythingwhich is valuable can be explained in the last analysis by the contributionit makes to the good of individuals." But most people take that to be theessence of moral individualism. Moreover, such a proposition is per-fectly compatible with the view that collective goods are intrinsic goodsbecause they are constituent goods. In other words, the rather weak andpoorly defined collectivism that emerges from Raz's analysis of the valueand nature of individual autonomy does nothing to challenge the founda-tions of moral individualism, as most people understand it." 2

111. See J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 200.112. A similar point is made in Graham, The Morality of Freedom (Book Review), 37 PHIL. Q.

481, 482 (1987). Raz's argument seemstoo easy a victory, relying as it does upon a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of individual-ism. An alternative, and I think more plausible individualism would hold that the value ofcollective goods must ultimately be explained by their value in the lives of individuals, andnot for instance in the activities of states, nations, or corporations. If the proper explana-tion shows them to have a constitutive and not merely an instrumental role in those lives,this need do nothing to disturb the fundamental reference to individuals.

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IV. PERFECTIONISM

A. THE VALUE OF AN AUTONOMOUS LIFE

The basis of Raz's perfectionism in political morality lies in the con-junction of three beliefs. The first is one from which other liberals wouldnot necessarily dissent: The government has a duty to promote auton-omy. The second seems innocuous as well, although liberals might wantto reconsider it after reading Raz's book: The government has a duty topromote autonomy only because and insofar as autonomy is valuable.But the third goes to the heart of Raz's position, and explains why thefirst two might set liberal sensibilities on edge: "Autonomous life is valu-able only if it is spent in the pursuit of acceptable and valuable projectsand relationships." '113 Together they entail his perfectionist conclusion:"The autonomy principle permits and even requires governments to cre-ate morally valuable opportunities, and to eliminate repugnant ones."'1 14

Raz defends the third proposition, that autonomy is valuable only tothe extent that it is exercised in the choice of options that are good, byasking:

[Has autonomy any value qua autonomy when it is abused? Is theautonomous wrongdoer a morally better person than the non-autono-mous wrongdoer? Our intuitions rebel against such a view. It is surelythe other way round. The wrongdoing casts a darker shadow on itsperpetrator if it is autonomously done by him.115

This argument does not work. The value of autonomy is not to beequated with the overall moral praiseworthiness of the autonomous per-son, any more than the value of courage is to be equated with the overallpraiseworthiness of a courageous person. That an action displays a cer-tain value adverbially, as it were, may make no difference to our overallassessment of whether the act was right or wrong or whether the agentshould be praised or blamed. There are many different evaluative thingsthat we can say about an action, and we must not assume that they allsum into a single assessment of the action or the agent.

We evaluate different aspects of a situation for different purposes.Thus, an act can be courageous, indeed even be a useful exemplar ofcourage, but have all the unmitigated wrongness of murder. Similarly, astyle of life can be prudent and temperate, even a paradigm of prudence

113. J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 417.114. Id.115. Id. at 380.

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and temperance and yet have all the unmitigated wrongness of a care-fully planned and executed conspiracy to defraud. We do not need to saythat because courage, temperance, and prudence have evaluative signifi-cance, they must therefore make the acts or lives they qualify better orworse. They are virtues everyone has reason to want, but not becausethey enhance the value of anything a person chooses to do. t l6 I suspectthat all the virtue concepts work like this; certainly some of them do.Thus, Raz's argument, quoted above, will not go through unless heshows that autonomy is unlike other virtues in that regard.

Maybe there is a better argument for the proposition that auton-omy's value depends on the value of what the autonomous personchooses. An autonomous choice is a choice made or embraced for rea-sons. We saw earlier that it is not supposed to be a choice made arbitrar-ily, though some of the reasons that make it non-arbitrary will flow fromthe fact of the choice itself. It is not supposed to look arbitrary from theoutside nor feel arbitrary from the inside. It is true that sometimes peo-ple choose for the wrong reasons or because of considerations that arenot really reasons (for them) at all. Even so, we cannot capture thechooser's intent except by saying that the person thinks she is choosing agoal on account of its value." 7 And objectively, we would want to saythat, when people pursue goals they think valuable but which are not,then their well-being would be better promoted if they fail in their pur-suit than if they succeed. We would expect too, in normal circumstances,that if the goal lacks the value that the chooser thinks it has, we shouldbe able to draw this to that person's attention in a way that brings her toregret its pursuit." 8

Raz's discussion of all this is complex and profound," 9 though itdoes rest on a broad identification of morality with reasons for actionwhich may seem question begging to some. At any rate, it provides abasis for a version of his claim that autonomy is valuable only when exer-cised in the pursuit of what is valuable. The considerations just outlinedestablish that, if one neglects the aspiration to value implicit in thechoices of an autonomous person, then one is likely to misrepresent whatit is that she values in her autonomy and why autonomy matters. Peoplevalue their autonomy because they value choosing projects and a way of

116. Indeed, Raz seems to concede this when he criticizes right-based theorists for thinking thatthe only value a virtue has is its contribution to the likelihood that virtuous people will do their duty.See id. at 197.

117. See id. at 411-12.118. See id. at 141.119. See id. at 300-20.

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life for reasons. They do not value it in spite of this aspect; they value itprecisely because of the opportunity it provides to shape their lives them-selves in accordance with the reasons that they apprehend. One doesviolence to the self-understanding of people aspiring to autonomy if oneadvises them that the moral quality of their choices is unimportant so faras the value of their autonomy is concerned.

But now, having established the third of Raz's propositions, we maywant to re-examine the second. For the purposes of the perfectionistargument, the second proposition is as follows: Governments have aduty to promote autonomy only because and insofar as it is valuable (inthe sense just established). This argument seems innocuous: The reasonsfor promoting something are of course the reasons that make it desirable.But appearances may be misleading. One cannot come away from a dis-cussion of autonomy this complex and dense without a suspicion that thereasons that governments promote autonomy are not exactly or simplisti-cally identical with the value of autonomy to autonomous individuals.

Think back to the account of the importance of autonomy. Thataccount was based on the facts of life in modern society: "For those wholive in an autonomy-supporting environment there is no choice but to beautonomous; there is no other way to prosper in such a society." 120 Thatsuggests that a government which fails to promote autonomy, or inter-feres with it in a social environment of this kind, makes life unbearablefor its citizens. When the government engages in this type of activity ittakes away from its citizens the only chance to prosper that they have.Stifling autonomy might be a permissible political strategy in a societywhere traditional ways of life are still available; where the conditions fornon-autonomous life have disappeared, however, the government mustaccept autonomy as the only route left open for the individuals it gov-erns. When an account of the duty to promote, or not to interfere with,autonomy is presented along these lines, it is not clear at all that it is aduty to promote autonomy only to the extent that autonomous choicesare good choices. Though the value of autonomy to the people who exer-cise it will certainly be bound up with the values they pursue in theirchoosing, the importance of promoting autonomy as an imperative forgovernments can be defended quite independently of that.

As I argued earlier, Raz could strengthen his case immeasurably bycoming out and saying with us moderns that autonomy is uncondition-ally a good thing. But so long as its importance is made relative to socialcircumstances in which no other mode of life is possible, then there is an

120. Id. at 391.

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argument that governments must respect autonomy which has nothing todo with the value of the options that autonomous persons embrace.Given that there is such a case, any argument that governments ought tomake their pursuit of autonomy sensitive to its character as a moral idealbegs the perfectionist question.

B. IMMORAL OPTIONS

Does it matter that Raz says almost nothing about what makes anoption or an individual's conception of the good repugnant or immoral,even though the central thrust of his argument is to establish the govern-ment's right, indeed its duty, to extirpate options of this sort?

Strategically, there is a good reason for this reticence. Raz does notwant the debate about perfectionism to become entangled in the debateabout whether a particular style of life is moral or immoral. If he placedmuch emphasis on examples, then the book would be read as Raz'sattack on pornography or Raz's attack on bullfighting. In real life, per-fectionist principles are sometimes invoked to discourage certain behav-ior like homosexual relationships, atheism, or the use of harmlessnarcotics. Liberals respond by saying that the alleged immorality doesnot justify the state's interference. But Raz is surely right to imply thatthe stronger response is to say that these things are simply not immoralat all. These activities are perfectly decent ways of living life, and anylegal ban is, therefore, an abuse of perfectionist principles. At any rate,he is right to ask whether there is anything left in the liberal critique ofperfectionism once we set aside the possibility that perfectionism mightbe deployed to support mistaken standards. As a practical matter thatpossibility always remains, but it is worth being clear all the same aboutwhere exactly the critique is directed. For this reason, perfectionism isbetter defended without examples.

It is worth noting that Raz's theory does not have much in commonwith the sort of legal moralism Patrick Devlin advocated some yearsago.121 Devlin opined that society was entitled to use legal means in sup-port of its established mores, irrespective of their objective moral quality:

[T]he law-maker is not required to make any judgement about what isgood and what is bad. The morals which he enforces are those ideasabout right and wrong which are already accepted by the society forwhich he is legislating and which are necessary to preserve its integ-rity .... Naturally he will assume that the morals of his society aregood and true; if he does not, he should not be playing an active part in

121. P. DEVLIN, THE ENFORCEMENT OF MORALS (1965).

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government. But he has not to vouch for their goodness and truth. 122

The reference to the "integrity" of society means its integrity as the par-ticular moral community it is. In other words, Devlin's approach is con-servative rather than perfectionist.

There is a conservative element in Raz's theory. The governmentcannot support or make available every worthwhile option in life, and ifit has to choose it may choose those that are already rooted in social liferather than promote lifestyles with which no one is familiar. 2 3 Even so,Raz would say that when a government takes action in support of anestablished social practice it does vouch for its goodness. No one shouldconcede the government's authority to take such action unless one thinksit is likely to be right sufficiently often to make it unacceptably risky froma moral point of view to take no notice of its strictures. 2 4

Whether a state has such competence is an empirical question.Some liberals have rested their opposition to perfectionism precisely onthe ground that the state's organization-crudely, a bureaucratic staff incommand of all the artillery in a territory-makes the state the lastagency to whom subtle questions of personal morality should beentrusted. 125 It is therefore worth asking what sort of considerationsmake an option good or moral on Raz's account: Without getting intoexamples, what sorts of factors will governments take into account whenthey determine that a lifestyle is so repugnant that political action shouldbe taken to discourage it?

The short answer that Raz gives is that such decisions will be basedon the same moral grounds as any other political decisions. On anyaccount, states are going to have to address moral issues-crime, justice,war, rights, and so on. Even if they follow doctrines of neutrality andanti-perfectionism, they do so because of the moral reasons, if there areany, that support such positions. Governments will have to be sensitiveto moral argument in those areas, and follow where they lead. That iswhy neutrality and antiperfectionism cannot be defended on the basis ofmoral skepticism: if nothing can be known on moral matters then thewrongness of perfectionism, not to say murder, cannot be known

122. Id. at 89-90, 94 (explicitly rejecting perfectionism in Raz's sense).123. See J. RAz, supra note 8, at 161-62, 427.124. See id. at 159-60, 412.125. See, eg., B. ACKERMAN, supra note 2, 361-65; cf. M. WEBER, Politics as a Vocation, in

FROM MAX WEBER: ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY 77, 118-28 (H. Gerth & C. Mills eds. 1946).

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either. 126 But Raz goes on to draw a faulty inference from thisargument:

Putting such general skepticism to one side, the question is: is therereason to think that one is more likely to be wrong about the characterof the good life than about the sort of moral considerations which allagree should influence political action such as the right to life, to freeexpression, or free religious worship? I know of no such arguments.The argument in the rest of the book.., showing that all aspects ofmorality derive from common sources refutes such a possibility. 127

In fact, it does no such thing. Algebra and arithmetic stem from a com-mon source, but that does not show that one is no more likely to makemistakes in the former than in the latter. That morality is coherentthrough all its departments and that rights are not cut loose from prem-ises about the good, does not establish that it is either homogenous orsmoothly unstructured. It may well be that questions of political moral-ity are easier to answer than questions of personal ethics, even thoughthey are rooted in the same sources. 128 1 have, for example, much moreconfidence in my view that religious freedom is necessary for people tohave any chance of making a decent life for themselves than I have in myview that the religious life is a repugnant and depraved way to live. Theconsiderations, if any, that establish the latter position may spring fromthe same premises about human dignity that ground the former, but theybecome more complex, more elusive, and certainly less demonstrable aswe move into the realm of personal ideals.129

A little later in the book, Raz distinguishes something he calls "nar-row morality": narrow morality comprises restrictions on each person'spursuit of her goals imposed in the interests of others. 130 It is prettyclear that the political morality which perfectionists and their opponentsagree should be upheld by law falls into this category. The basic princi-ples of criminal law, property law, economy, and distributive justice, areimposed to determine the extent to which one individual may affect orcompromise others' pursuit of their interests for the sake of the pursuit of

126. See J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 160. Failure to see this point disfigures the discussion in B.ACKERMAN, supra note 2, at 11,368-69. For a better view, see G. HARRISON, Relativism and Toler-ance, in 5 PHIL., POL. AND Soc'V 273 (P. Laslett & J. Fishkin eds. 1979).

127. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 160-61.128. There is also the point N. Simmonds made in his Article, The Morality of Freedom (Book

Review), 46 CAMBRIDGE L.i. 167, 168 (1987) ("the ultimate basis of a moral institution may bemore uncertain [than] the institution itself. derivation from a common source therefore shows noth-ing about relative certainty or possibility of error.").

129. For an excellent discussion, see P. F. STRAWSON, Social Morality and Individual Ideal, inFREEDOM AND RESENTMENT, AND OTHER ESSAYS 26 (1974).

130. See J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 213-14.

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her own. No one denies that the state may act to discourage or even banthe pursuit of individual lifestyles which impose an unacceptable cost onothers, and that substantive moral reasoning is necessary to determinewhich costs are fair and acceptable and which are not. John Rawls, forexample, insists that this reasoning, about justice as fairness, has norma-tive priority over the exercise of individual autonomy: "The principles of... justice... impose restrictions on what are reasonable conceptions ofone's good. In drawing up plans and in deciding on aspirations men areto take these constraints into account." 131

But perfectionism goes beyond this, into the realm of "wide moral-ity"-"the art of life," i.e., the precepts instructing people how to liveand what makes for a "successful, meaningful, and worthwhile life,"' 32

even when the interests of others are not directly involved. Again, with-out placing too much emphasis on examples, these precepts will includesuch things as: monogamous love;133 respect for the arts;' 34 the impor-tance of friendship; 135 the need to avoid putting a price on love andfriendship;' 36 the importance of loyalty;' 37 the value of spontaneity; 138

and the preference for a tasteful, rather than a vulgar, urban environ-ment.139 If Raz's perfectionism is distinct from the commitment to jus-tice which he shares with Rawls and others, it is because it implies thatthe state may act on the basis of these considerations as well.

C. LIBERAL NEUTRALITY

What I have termed the traditional liberal position holds that thestate should be neutral at least on aspects of morality involving what Razcalls "the art of life."'" If people choose to live lives that are (for exam-ple) polygamous, philistine, solitary, mercenary, rigid, or vulgar, the gov-ernment should do nothing to discourage them. The depravity of theseways of life is, of course, a reason for others to remonstrate with thesepeople, reason with them, entreat them, persuade them and, if that doesnot work, avoid their company. But it is not a reason for compelling

131. J. RAwLs, supra note 4, at 31.

132. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 213.133. See id. at 161.

134. See id. at 215.135. See id. at 306.136. See id. at 347-53.137. See id. at 354-55.138. See id. at 384.139. See id. at 422.140. Id. at 213.

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them or taking political action to visit upon them any evil or disadvan-tage if they will not mend their ways.1 41

Neutrality, as Raz argues, is an ambiguous principle. It may mean,on the one hand, that the government must take care not to do anythingwhich makes it more likely that one conception of the good will flourishrather than another. This imposes a duty of care on the government tosee that its actions are evenhanded. On the other hand, neutrality maymean that, whatever the effects of it's actions, the moral merits of com-peting conceptions of the good do not provide the government with anyvalid reason for promoting one rather than the other. I shall call the firstneutrality of effect and the second neutrality of reasons. The differencebetween these concepts can be delineated by considering a case posed byJohn Locke:

[I]f any people congregated upon account of religion should be desir-ous to sacrifice a calf, I deny that that ought to be prohibited by a law.Meliboeus, whose calf it is, may lawfully kill his calf at home, and burnany part of it that he thinks fit. For no injury is thereby done to anyone, no prejudice to another man's goods. And for the same reason hemay kill his calf also in a religious meeting. Whether the doing so bewell-pleasing to God or no, it is their part to consider that do it....But if peradventure such were the state of things that the interest ofthe commonwealth required all slaughter of beasts should be forbornefor some while, in order to the increasing of the stock of cattle that hadbeen destroyed by some extraordinary murrain, who sees not that themagistrate, in such a case, may forbid all his subjects to kill any calvesfor any use whatsoever? Only 'tis to be observed, that in this case thelaw is not made about a religious, but a political matter; nor is thesacrifice, but the slaughter of calves, thereby prohibited.142

The economic ban on killing calves will certainly have a differentialeffect on the bovine sacrifice cult, relative to its effect on other cults, so itis ruled out by neutrality of effect. But the ban is not imposed for thatreason, and, indeed, as Locke points out, it can be formulated in termsthat make no reference to the idea of animal sacrifice. Therefore, the bandoes not fall foul of neutrality of reasons.

141. Cf J.S. MILL, ON LIBERTY 13 (C. Shields ed. 1956).

He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to doso, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would bewise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning withhim, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him withany evil in case he do otherwise.

Id.

142. J. LOCKE, supra note 5, at 147-48.

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Elsewhere I have argued that which of these conceptions of neutral-ity one chooses depends not on dictionary definitions but rather upon thearguments supporting the underlying position.143 For example, Mill'sargument about the need to preserve a diverse array of lifestyles andopinions, some of them good and some of them bad, weighs in favor ofneutrality of effect, whereas an argument based on skepticism about poli-ticians' abilities to distinguish good conceptions from bad ones weighs infavor of neutrality of reasons. Neither argument, as it stands, contributesanything to the case for the other conception."4

Raz quickly dismisses neutrality of effect, and I have no wish toquibble with his argument. It would be an extraordinarily demandingideal, because almost every governmental action is going to have someimpact on the prospects for various lifestyles, some impact on the moralenvironment. Neutrality of effect entails that the government must takecare to see that unworthy options do not suffer as a result of its actions.This might make sense if there were some inherent or instrumental valuein the existence and flourishing of unworthy options. But Raz insists,along lines already mentioned, that there is no such value, and he has nopatience with the view that the presence of depraved options sharpens orcontributes to our sense of the good.'45

Neutrality of reasons is another matter. It places limits on whatmay count as a good reason in politics. Citizens may permissibly act forpurposes that are not permissible for governments to pursue. Thoughcitizens always make personal decisions of lifestyle based upon the moralmerits, in a broad sense, as they understand them, a government musteschew all such considerations in its legislative, policymaking, andadministrative activities. Such a constraining principle might be justifiedon the grounds that ethical reasoning gets distorted when one movesfrom the personal into the political sphere.'" But, in order to focus thediscussion on Raz's argument, for the rest of this Article, I shall consideronly the case that might be made for neutrality of intention on the basisof respect for personal autonomy.

143. See J. Waldron, Legislation and Moral Neutrality, in LIBERAL NEUTRALITY, supra note 7.144. Hence Ackerman's strategy in defending neutrality is hopeless and leads to incoherence.

He argues that it makes no difference how one defends neutrality, that one can be as liberal aboutthat as one is about conceptions of the good. B. ACKERMAN, supra note 2, at 11-12, 358-59.

145. See J. RAz, supra note 8, at 380-81; cf J.S. MILL, supra note 141, at 43-55 (concerning hisargument for allowing false opinions to flourish).

146. See supra note 125 and accompanying text.

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There are several ways in which the neutrality principle might beattacked. Some of them are silly. Thomas Nagel argues that "since neu-trality needs as much justification as any other position," it is self-defeat-ing as an ideal because it cannot be justified in a neutral way.147 Butneutrality does not require a neutral defense (whatever that means); oneis always neutral in a particular conflict for a reason, and, of course, oneis not neutral about that reason. What is required is that there be amoral justification for neutrality. Morality is not simply the set of indi-vidual conceptions of the good; as Raz emphasizes repeatedly, ideals likeautonomy function quite differently from the latter.1 48 Hence, basingone's neutrality on a commitment to autonomy is not basing it on a com-mitment drawn from the domain of options among which neutrality isenjoined.

Nagel also argues that liberal neutrality discriminates againstoptions and lifestyles that are not individualistic-those that involve theexistence of social structures.1 49 The silliness of this criticism is a littlemore complex because Raz succeeds in showing that the contrastbetween lifestyles that involve social structures and those that do not ismisconceived. 150 It is true that liberals have traditionally ordained neu-trality only among personal lifestyles, not among social options, such asIslamic conceptions of law, communitarian ideals, established churchesand the like. But this does not show that neutrality is incoherent. Theliberal enjoins neutrality in regard to Conflict A, the conflict betweencompeting conceptions of individual good, because of some opinionabout what is at stake in that conflict. The fact that Conflict B, a conflictbetween competing conceptions of social structure, can be identified as aconflict of a somewhat different sort need not embarrass liberals. Thereare different things at stake in Conflict B, and they are things for whichneutrality would be enjoined, if it was enjoined at all, for utterly differentreasons. The fact that the liberal cannot be neutral in every ethical dis-pute, and has no reason to be, is not an indictment of liberalism.

Let me turn now to the serious arguments that Raz makes againstneutrality. One strategy declares that because neutrality is a principle ofrestraint, all the perfectionist needs to do is show that the restraint isunjustified. One does not have to give positive reasons in favor of state

147. Nagel, supra note 7, at 9. Raz appears to accept Nagel's argument. J. RAZ, supra note 8,at 118.

148. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 391.149. Nagel, supra note 7, at 9-10. Raz appears to accept this argument also J. RAZ, supra note

8, at 119.150. See J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 307-13.

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action to support the good. What is more natural than that one shouldact to encourage worthy ideals and discourage unworthy ones? Unlessgood reasons are provided for restraint, perfectionism follows simplyfrom one's evaluation of the worthiness or unworthiness of an ideal. Theperfectionist can afford to sit back and pick off the mainstream liberalarguments as they come.

In fact, however, the connection between evaluation and perfection-ist intervention is not nearly so straightforward. That an ideal is unwor-thy provides a person with a reason not to choose it as her ideal, but it isnot at all clear that it provides others, let alone the state, with a reason todiscourage her from choosing it. It does so if it is true that the othershave an independent reason to see to it that she chooses well. But that isproblematic in the context of a theory which finds virtue in people choos-ing options for themselves.

Raz attempts to finesse this point by asking what he thinks is a rhe-torical question:

Is one treating another with respect if one treats him in accordancewith sound moral principles, or does respect for persons require ignor-ing morality (or parts of it) in our relations with others? There can belittle doubt that stated in this way the question admits of only oneanswer. One would be showing disrespect to another if one ignoredmoral considerations in treating him.151

As Raz states the point, one must agree. But perfectionism is notthe theory that we should treat others morally. A more honest way ofputting the question would be: "Is one treating others with respect if onetries to get them to act in accordance with sound moral principles"?That is a genuinely open question, and, moreover, it seems helpfully sen-sitive to the nature of the means that are used to promote moral action, aconcern which Raz's formulation neglects.

So one may need a positive justification for perfectionist interventioneven if the defender of neutrality provides no valid argument for politicalrestraint. Unfortunately, Raz sketches only one such argument and it israther unconvincing.

Supporting valuable forms of life is a social rather than an individualmatter. Monogamy, assuming that it is the only morally valuable formof marriage, cannot be practiced by an individual. It requires a culturewhich recognizes it, and which supports it through the public's atti-tude and through its formal institutions .... [P]erfectionist idealsrequire public action for their viability. Anti-perfectionism in practice

151. Id. at 157.

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would lead not merely to a political stand-off from support for valuableconceptions of the good. It would undermine the chances of survivalof many cherished aspects of our culture.' 52

Though Raz does a good job of showing the social character ofmany liberal ideals, nothing he says comes close to establishing the claimnecessary to his position: that valuable options require recognitionthrough law and the formal institutions of society in order to survive.That claim is simply incredible. Religious faith fares far better inAmerica than in Britain, where there is an Established Church. 1 3 Thechanges there have been in the concept of friendship over the last fewcenturies have nothing to do with changes in legal and political institu-tions. 154 The increased availability of formal opportunities for politicalparticipation seems to correlate inversely with the extent and substanceof such participation. 5' Often we lawyers simply exaggerate the extentto which social practices need formal institutionalization. The socialenvironment might indeed be quite different if perfectionist standardswere not embodied in legal principles, but I doubt that it would be anypoorer or that the worthy options would be any less diverse. Good socialpractices are likely to be those capable of flourishing perfectly well ontheir own, unassisted by the efforts of the law.

D. COERCION AND THE STATE

Besides their doubts about the positive case for perfectionism,defenders of neutrality are worried about the means that political actionmight involve. This explains their special preoccupation with the state.Weber convinced most of us that "the state cannot be defined in terms ofits ends .... Ultimately, one can define the modem state sociologicallyonly in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every politicalassociation, namely, the use of physical force."' 56 The point is not thatstates can act only through force; it is rather that their coercive resourcesgive them their distinctive supremacy and ultimately provide them with

152. Id. at 162.

153. See S. HUNTINGTON, AMERICAN POLITICS: THE PROMISE OF DISHARMONY 156 (1981)(Gallup polls indicate 94% of Americans believe in God and 71% in a life after death. Comparablefigures for the United Kingdon, where there is an established church are 76% and 43%respectively.).

154. See R. BELLAH, HABITS OF THE HEART: INDIVIDUALISM AND COMMITMENT IN AMERI-

CAN LIFE (1985) for an excellent discussion.

155. See H. ARENDT, ON REVOLUTION 111-37 (1965).

156. M. WEBER, supra note 125, at 77-78.

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the ability to use whatever other means they have at their disposal.157

Raz, however, has never been convinced that the use of force is dis-tinctive of states and legal orders. In earlier work, he argued that,although as a matter of fact all existing legal systems use sanctionsimposed by force, still a legal system can be imagined which makes noresort to such methods.158 In the present work, he says that a state isdefined by the generality of its claim to authority: "[the state] claimsauthority to regulate all aspects of life." '15 9 Unfortunately, this is distinc-tive neither of the state nor of the legal order. All sorts of normativeorders claim comprehensive authority-the law of the Catholic church,for example, which (on its own account and that is all that interests Razin this passage) claims to apply to all mankind and, potentially, toactions of any and every sort. The state cannot be distinguished fromother orders claiming comprehensive authority except by reference to thegreater likelihood that its claims will be upheld. Despite what Raz says,its supremacy ultimately springs from its command of considerablemeans of violence.

This general point provides a background for evaluating Raz's claimthat "[p]erfectionist goals need not be pursued by the use of coercion."1 60

It is certainly true that individuals may pursue perfectionist goals non-coercively by banding together in self-improvement groups, setting upculture collectives, raising the tone of their conversation, making dona-tions to athletes and artists and such. But Raz's claim is supposed to betrue of the state. In its pursuit of human excellence, a government mightchoose to tax some kinds of leisure activities and subsidize others, or toconfer public honors on artists, for example, or people of exemplary vir-tue, or use its authority in a range of areas from urban planning to educa-tion to promote various noble conceptions of the good, or provide a legalframework to house some types of relationship but not others, as it doesin the case of monogamous marriage. If such non-coercive means areused, Raz thinks there can be no objection at all to the official pursuit ofperfectionist goals. The background to mainstream liberal concern aboutthis view is, as I have said, the fact that even if governmental activity is

157. The heart of John Locke's case for toleration centered around this understanding of thestate in terms of its distinctive means. "[Tihe care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate,because his power consists only in outward force.. ." J. LOCKE, supra note 5, at 129. Cf. Waldron,Locke: Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution, in JUSTIFYING TOLERATION (S. Mendus ed.1988) (criticizing Locke's case for toleration as "inadequate and unconvincing").

158. J. RAz, supra note 33, at 154-62.159. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 4.

160. Id. at 417.

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not overtly coercive, still in the last resort the government's ability toundertake any activity at all rests on its coercive power.

Is it possible to divide the means available to the state into those thatare coercive and those that are noncoercive? It can be done, superficially,no doubt: There is nothing overtly coercive about a subsidy. But that isnot the end of the matter. Given that the subsidy is paid by a govern-ment, we have to ask whether there is anything deeper about governmentsubsidies which engages the same sort of concerns that arise with out-right coercion.

What are these concerns? Why does Raz rule out overtly coerciveaction for perfectionist purposes? The short answer is that lie does not-at least for certain perfectionist purposes. In order to ensure a fair degreeof autonomy for all, in at least a capacity sense, the government is enti-tled to deploy its coercive power. The argument is complex and involvesRaz's version of Mill's famous "harm principle." '6 1 Coercion is bothactually and symbolically a threat to autonomy. 62 But "harm" can bedefined in terms of the diminution of a person's prospects for the autono-mous life she has chosen.1 63 Hence, to say that coercion may be usedonly to prevent harm is to say that the autonomy of one person may bethreatened only where it is necessary to avoid some unacceptable diminu-tion of the autonomy of another. And Raz subscribes to this view.lM

Now, we saw earlier in our discussion of "narrow" morality thatperfectionist ideals go beyond principles of respect for the interests ofothers. They open up into wide morality, the precepts of "the art of life"that we considered at the end in Part IV. One could attempt to use coer-cion in this area as well. Certainly many if not all legal systems havetried to do so sometime in their history, and many still do so now; ban-ning certain forms of consensual sex is the most obvious example. ButRaz believes coercion would be wrong in this area, even if the valuesupheld were acceptable ones. Though coercion imperils autonomy,

[a] moral theory which values autonomy highly can justify restrictingthe autonomy of one person for the sake of the greater autonomy ofothers or even of that person himself in the future. That is why it can

161. J. S. MILL, supra note 141, at 13: "[Ihe only purpose for which power can be exercisedover any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

162. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 418.163. See id. at 413-14.164. See id. at 417-18. He would also, I take it, subscribe to Mill's view that the harm principle

has two sides to it, legitimating coercion in certain cases, as well as restraining it in others. See J.S.MILL, supra note 141, at 127: "[O]wing to the absence of any recognized general principles, liberty.is often granted where it should be withheld, as well as withheld where it should be granted ...."

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justify coercion to prevent harm, for harm interferes with autonomy.But it will not tolerate coercion for other reasons. The availability ofrepugnant options, and even their free pursuit by individuals, does notdetract from their autonomy. Undesirable as these conditions are theymay not be curbed by coercion.1 65

The position is not an easy one for Raz to defend, for his perfection-ism tends to push him further than this. It is true that if we ban an

option which is depraved but not harmful, we will be compromising theautonomy of those who would otherwise be tempted to choose it. Butaccording to Raz, we would not be compromising autonomy in any sense

that mattered, for he claims that autonomy to choose a depraved optionhas either no value or negative value. So what is wrong with a ban onharmless depravity? Raz's answer is a ultimately a pragmatic one:

[C]oercion by criminal penalties is a global and indiscriminate invasionof autonomy. Imprisoning a person prevents him from almost allautonomous pursuits. Other forms of coercion may be less severe, butthey all invade autonomy, and they all, at least in this world, do it in afairly indiscriminate way. That is, there is no practical way of ensur-ing that the coercion will restrict the victims' choice of repugnantoptions but will not interfere with their other choices.1 6 6

We might imagine circumstances in which this concern about coercion

would not be applicable; and if so, then of course the restraint shouldevaporate. 167 In any case, the passage makes clear that Raz's liberalreluctance, if it can be called that, to use legal power in the service ofperfectionist ideals applies only and at most to those forms of powerwhich invade the autonomy of the individuals affected on a fairly broadand indiscriminate front.

E. NON-COERCIVE PERFECTIONISM

Whatever the case with coercion, "Raz does not believe it is wrongfor the state to use its fiscal powers to promote perfectionist ideals. Itmay tax activities that are depraved in order to discourage them and tomark its disapproval. It may subsidize those that are particularly noble,if that makes it more likely that they will prosper. And it may embodymorally good practices in the framework of the law of the land-in theway monogamous marriage is embodied-if that can be done withoutcoercive invasions of autonomy.

165. J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 419.166. Id. at 418-19.167. See id. at 419.

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In this Section, I argue that all three of these methods should besubjects for serious liberal concern. Part of my strategy will be to com-pare them with the sort of coercion that Raz opposes, and to ask whetherthey engage at an implicit level any of the misgivings that coercionengages explicitly. But I shall also try to develop an independent argu-ment against these forms of perfectionism based not only on the analogywith coercion, but on a deeper account of respect for individual moralchoice.

1. Taxation

Suppose a government imposes, as Raz suggests, a heavy tax onforms of activity which it regards as morally depraved. He cites theexample of fox hunting in England,168 but any example of genuinedepravity will do. The point of such a tax is presumably to mark com-munal disapproval of the practice and to do so in a way that discouragespeople from engaging in it.

What does it mean to discourage an activity by imposing a tax? Itmeans, presumably, that the state raises the costs that a person mustincur if she wants to pursue the activity. All options involve costs-atthe very least, opportunity costs. If an activity like fox hunting is taxed,then those who want to hunt must face the fact that they will have lessmoney in their pockets as a result-that is, they will have a lesser shareof resources to spend on other things than they would if the tax was notimposed.

It is important in this discussion to bracket off issues of justice andredistribution. Maybe a tax on fox hunting is justified anyway ongrounds of soaking the rich. But Raz's proposal has got to be able tosurvive the assumption that the distribution of wealth might in all otherrespects be fair and just, and that the only reason for differentially taxingthis activity is that-it is depraved and should be discouraged.

Now, certainly, altering the costs and payoffs of an activity lookslike coercion. After all, what a threat does, if it is credible, is precisely toadd an artificial cost to an activity. The threat, "Your money or yourlife," (assuming it is a genuine alternative!) adds the cost of death to theoption of keeping one's money. And in exactly the way that the high-wayman makes it impossible for the victim to pursue that option withoutaccepting the cost, so, presumably, our perfectionist state will act to

168. See id. at 161.

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restrain any hunters who try to ride to hounds without paying the stipu-lated fee. That restraint will be coercive, even if one wants to insist thatthe tax is not.

The point is an important one, because it reiterates the theme thatthe coercive power of the state stands in the background even when it isnot overtly deployed. It also indicates the complexity of the notion of athreat, and it may be worth unpacking that complexity in order to get agrip on the permissibility of perfectionist taxation. For example, supposeA threatens to break B's vase unless B hits C. There are many reasonswhy A's making that threat might be wrong. Here are some of them:

(i) Because the threatened sanction is wrong (i.e., it is wrong tobreak other people's pottery), the announcement of one's intention, evenone's conditional intention, to do it may be wrong also. 169 Not all threatsare wrong in this way. Blackmail, for example, often involves a threat toperform an act that is independently right (e.g., reporting the victim'swrongdoing to the appropriate authorities).

(ii) In order to make a threat credible, the threatener must havesome power over the victim, and holding that power may be wrong. Thethreat's credibility, in our example, depends upon A already having holdof B's vase. It may have been wrong of A to get hold of it or keep hold ofit once B realized what was happening.

(iii) The action one is trying to get the victim to do may be wrong,so a fortiori it is wrong to try (by whatever means) to get him or her todo it. In our example, it is wrong for B to hit C, and so wrong of A to tryto encourage the act.

(iv) The threat may be of such magnitude as to interfere with theautonomy of the victim. It may be wrong therefore simply because itundermines something that is valuable. In our case, this will depend onhow important the vase is to B. As we have seen, Raz argues quite con-vincingly that a threat may interfere with an individual's autonomy eventhough it is not a threat of serious injury or death. If the good threatenedis strategic to a person's conception of the good, then the cost that thethreatener is attaching to one of the options is the cost of giving up theworthwhile life one has chosen. Clearly not all threats have this charac-ter. If B does not cherish the vase in the special way just mentioned, thethreat may be wrong for reasons (i)-(iii), but not for reason (iv).

169. This is one of the reasons many people have misgivings about the morality of nucleardeterrence: Since the killing of millions of civilians is wrong, then presumably any threat to killthem is wrong also, irrespective of the purpose for which the threat is made.

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Presumably, the same is true for the small fines associated with cer-tain legal bans: The loss of fifty dollars for smoking marijuana is hardlygoing to overwhelm my pursuit of the good. But fines have one featurethat distinguishes them from taxes. In the latter case, all that the author-ities may do is collect the money from those who choose to engage in theactivity. But in the case of fines arising under criminal law, the authori-ties also have the responsibility of actually preventing the offending con-duct if they can, whether or not the offender is willing to pay. Thismeans that there is an extra coercive dimension associated with criminalrestrictions that it is not associated with taxes.

In many cases, a threat which is wrong for reason (iv) will be also bea threat which justifies or excuses the victim's compliance. Raz makesmuch of this in his discussion,17 but I think he exaggerates the connec-tion. Whether a threat excuses is one thing, whether and how it is wrongis another. They are different types of normative significance. There maybe some acts which are never justified or excused by coercion.171 That is,there may be some occasions on which one is morally required to surren-der one's autonomy rather than obey the threatener. But even in thesecases, making the threat will still be wrong for autonomy-relatedreasons.

172

(v) Finally, it may be that there is something wrong with trying toinfluence someone's choices with a threat even if the threat falls short ofreason (iv). Certainly that is wrong in some cases, even when the threatis not wrong in any other way. Suppose a man threatens a woman withthe loss of some favor which he has it in his power to bestow if she doesnot consent to sex with him: for example, "Unless you sleep with me, Iwill revoke the $100 legacy to you that is presently in my will." Thethreatened sanction is not wrong; the threatener does not need wrongfulpower over the victim in order to impose it; the act he is trying to get herto do is not wrong in itself or its consequences; and the loss of the smalllegacy is hardly likely to overpower her will. Nevertheless the threat iswrong, I think, just because this is the sort of decision to which oneshould not attach costs in an artificial sort of way. In deciding whetherto sleep with him, the woman might want to consider a range of factors.But he should not try to manipulate her by adding to that range factorsthat are not part of the inherent "merits" of the issue.

170. J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 150-53.171. For example, murder in recent English law see Abbott v. The Queen, [1976] 3 All E.R. 140172. There is an excellent discussion in Frankfurt, Coercion and Moral Responsibility, in ESSAYS

ON FREEDOM OF ACTION 63 (1. Honderich ed. 1973).

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Let us go back now to the perfectionist tax on fox hunting. Is itwrong in any of these senses? Clearly it is not wrong in sense (iii); or, if itis, we have chosen our case badly, since we are assuming that what thestate is trying to get people to do (refrain from fox-hunting) really is goodand noble. And we may assume it is not wrong in sense (iv), if onlybecause a tax so severe as to overwhelm people's autonomy wouldalready be excluded by Raz's prohibition on coercion.

Senses (i) and (ii) are not so easy. Unless one holds a general liberta-rian suspicion of all taxation, one may want to say that the imposition ofthe tax is wrong in sense (i) only if it is wrong in one or more of thesenses (ii)-(v). And the same may be true of (ii). In other words,whether or not it is wrong to impose and collect a tax, and hold thepower necessary to do so, depends upon whether the tax is justified.Only an anarchist believes that taxes are unjustified because it is wrongfor any person or agency to collect or have the power to collect them. Itseems, then, that it is wrong for the government to take the money fromthe fox hunters and wrong for it to have and exercise the power to be in aposition to take the money only if there is some independent reason forholding that taxing fox hunting is wrong. Since we have eliminated (iii)and (iv), that leaves (v) as the crucial question.

I suggested that, in the case of some actions, it is important that thedecision whether or not to perform them to be taken "on the merits,"rather than on account of artificially imposed consequences. If and tothe extent that this is important, taxing an activity in order to discourageit might be wrong, for it prevents people from refraining from it for theright reasons, so to speak. An argument along these lines is certainlybound up with the ideal of autonomy. Throughout the book, Razemphasizes the notion of self-authorship, the idea that an autonomousperson responds to value by choosing for reasons the person apprehends:"it is the special character of autonomy that one cannot make anotherperson autonomous." '73 As we saw when we discussed manipulation inSection III of Part C, an autonomous decision may be undermined notonly by overt coercion from the outside, but also by interfering with theway people form their beliefs about value. 74 Messing with the optionsthat one faces, changing one's payoffs can be seen as manipulation alongthese lines. If it is done intentionally, it also takes on the insulting aspect

173. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 407.174. Id. at 377-78.

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of manipulation,' 75 for it treats the agent as someone incapable of mak-ing independent moral decisions on the merits of the case.

The main difficulty with the approach I am suggesting lies in thedistinction between "the merits" of an option and factors and payoffsthat are introduced artificially from the outside. Certainly, the idea of themerits of an option must go beyond its intrinsic character: As RonaldDworkin has emphasized, decisions whether to adopt some taste or pas-time are rightly influenced not only by its inherent attractions but also byconsideration of the costs that its pursuit by us will impose on others.We must consider what resources we are using, whether this is more thanour fair share, and so on. 17 6 But though this will complicate matters itwill not do so unduly.

The important thing about the tax we are imagining is that its per-fectionist justification, if there is one, will already refer to the merits ofthe option in question. The government's decision to tax fox hunting, forexample, will be justified by exactly those factors which a potentialhunter ought to consider when making the decision whether to opt forthis pastime. As an autonomous agent, the hunter should be the oneresponding to those considerations, and those are the only considerationsthe hunter should be responding to when making the choice. The impo-sition of the tax, then, is necessarily manipulative, for it influences a per-son's decision by distorting that individual's understanding of the meritsof the choice.

In all of this, I have assumed that the motivation behind the tax issimply to discourage the activity-that it is not intended as a revenueraising device. However, Mill suggested an interesting point about reve-nue raising in a perfectionist context. He conceded that taxing thingslike alcohol and narcotics "for the sole purpose of making them moredifficult to be obtained is a measure differing only in degree from theirentire prohibition."' 77 But he added that, of course, there are going tohave to be some consumption taxes if the government is to have sufficientrevenue to discharge its legitimate responsibilities. There is also noavoiding the fact that for some people these taxes will have a persuasiveor prohibitive effect:

It is hence the duty of the State to consider, in the imposition of taxes,what commodities the consumer can best spare; and afortiori, to select

175, Id. at 420.176. See R. DWORKIN, supra note 1, at 193-94; Dworkin, What is Equality? Part L Equality of

Welfare, 10 PHIL. & PuB. AFF. 185 (1981); Dworkin, What is Equality? Part I. Equality ofResources, 10 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 283 (1981).

177. J.S. MILL, supra note 141, at 122.

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in preference those of which it deems the use, beyond a very moderatequantity, to be positively injurious. Taxation, therefore, of stimulantsup to the point which produces the largest amount of revenue (suppos-ing that the State needs all the revenue which it yields) is not onlyadmissible, but to be approved of. 78

I cannot see any way to dispute the application of this to perfectionistissues. It may be wrong for the government to tax harmless but depravedactivities purely for the purpose of discouraging them. But if it must taxsome pursuits anyway, it might as well choose those that are depraved.

2. Subsidies

Taxing an activity thought to be depraved may be wrong because itinterferes with autonomy in a manipulative way. But what about subsi-dizing an activity thought to be noble?

The argument is not quite so straightforward, since there is no sim-ple symmetry between taxes and subsidies. A tax is an inducement torefrain from an activity, but a subsidy is not necessarily an inducement toparticipate in it. Usually, a subsidy decreases the cost of participating inthe activity in question, rather than giving an additional reason to par-ticipate in the activity. The trouble with a perfectionist tax is that itprovides a reason for refraining from an activity that is not one of what Ihave called "the merits" of the case. A subsidy would be objectionableon similar grounds if it were so substantial as to provide a positiveinducement to an activity thought to be noble. We would then worrybecause people were responding, not to the nobility of the activity, but tothe bribe that was being offered for pursuing it.

But if people's reasons for participating in an activity are good andnoble, is it wrong to use tax revenue to facilitate their participation, tomake it easier for them? Raz says it is no objection that the tax is raisedcoercively:

I assume that tax is raised to provide adequate opportunities, and isjustified by the principle of autonomy in a way consistent with theharm principle.... The government has an obligation to create anenvironment providing individuals with an adequate range of optionsand the opportunities to choose them. The duty arises out of people'sinterest in having a valuable autonomous life.... Not every tax can bejustified by this argument. But then not every tax is justified by anyargument. A tax which cannot be justified by the argument here out-lined should not be raised. 179

178. Id. at 123.179. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 417-18.

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This last point, of course, is absurd: there are other justifications fortaxes besides the one mentioned here. But it does sound as though Razwants to restrict the subsidization of options only to cases where it isnecessary to provide an adequate environment for autonomy. If such anenvironment exists already, the government may not use coercivelyraised funds to subsidize existing or additional options purely on thegrounds of their goodness.

It is pretty clear why this would be. To begin with, there would bethe problem of selecting which good options to subsidize. For example,may the government subsidize some among the plurality of good optionsbut not others? May it choose to subsidize sport, for example, ratherthan opera, provided that the necessary range of cultural opportunitieswill exist anyway? And how should these choices be made? If the goodoptions are incommensurable inter se and if, as we have seen, many of thereasons for favoring one of them over another spring from the choice toengage in the favored option, may government officials choose theoptions they happen to engage in themselves? Remember we are not nowasking whether their "say so" makes it right. The question is simply:How do they choose between incompatible goods if a choice has to bemade? If they choose to subsidize option A rather than option B, is thatnot unfair to the adherents of B who, in virtue of their choice of B, haveno reason to favor A? (To sharpen these questions, assume for the sakeof argument that religion is a good thing, and ask how a governmentshould choose which church to subsidize.) Though Raz talks of movingfrom neutrality to pluralism,180 and though he says a government maytake a hand "in directing or initiating" the processes by which someoptions flourish and others wither away,' 8' he offers no guidance on howgovernments should choose among a plurality of goods, when all cannotbe favored.

The other worry about subsidies is really an echo of the argumentabout taxation. To subsidize an activity is to lessen the costs that mustbe borne by those who choose to engage in it. Once again, to clarify theargument, we must assume that there is no redistributive argument forthe subsidy, and that the pre-subsidy costs are a fair reflection of theimpact that an activity has on one's resources available for other pur-suits.'"2 (If these assumptions do not hold, then no specifically perfec-tionist argument for the subsidy is necessary.) What a subsidy does,

180. Id. at 130.181. Id. at 410-11.182. Dworkin emphasizes that the arts are public goods in the economists' sense, and so their

pre-subsidy market costs may not be an accurate reflection of their impact on community resources.

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then, is to give those who benefit from it a misleading and distorted pic-ture of the real costs and benefits of engaging in the subsidized activity.It seems to me that, for example, those who consider cultivating a tastefor opera ought to give some consideration to the resources that must beused to produce live opera and to the opportunities that are foregone insociety when resources are used in that way. But if their opera ticketsare subsidized by the state, because opera is a noble and wonderful art,then they are not being encouraged to consider the matter on its merits.Instead, they make their choices blithely unaware of the extent to whichtheir enjoyments deprive them and others of the use of social capital.

Once again, the underlying point is about respect for autonomy. Inchoosing which activities to encourage through subsidization, the gov-ernment is making its decision on the merits of those activities. Is thisnot a decision that each person should be making? Is it not treating peo-ple like children to make that decision for them, and then adjust thepayoffs so that they will accept it more easily. We must keep hold of oneof the deepest insights in the liberal tradition: Governments are merelycomposed of people who happen to wield extraordinary power. There-fore, when a decision is made to subsidize an activity, one group of peo-ple is deciding a moral issue that ought essentially to be decided by otherpeople acting on their own. Raz stresses rightly, throughout the book,that the fact that a government thinks something is good is not a reasonin itself for acting as though it were good."83 But he does not placenearly enough stress on the insult involved when the government actu-ally takes it upon itself to think about such matters in the first place.

3. Legal Frameworks

There is not room in this Article to review all the putatively non-coercive means by which Raz believes perfectionist ideals might be pur-sued. The final one that I want to consider, however, is the embodimentof some perfectionist ideal in a legal framework for social relations. Thecase that springs to mind is the special preference given to long termmonogamous relationships, over, say, polygamy or casually serialmonogamy, in the legal institution of marriage."8 4 In what follows, I

R. DWORKIN, supra note 1, at 221-33. Raz, however, does not link his account of subsidies to histheory of public goods. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 198-203.

183. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 412.184. Id. at 161.

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shall assume that monogamy is greatly preferable to these other relation-ships, on moral grounds.185

It might be thought the legal principle of monogamy is a coerciveone. After all, bigamy is a serious criminal offence, punishable by longterms of imprisonment. But that is a misunderstanding. Unless there isalso a ban on fornication, people are perfectly at liberty to live inmenages, or polygamous relationships, with as many lovers as theyplease. What they may not do is give those relationships the imprimaturof matrimonial law: Bigamy is the offense of going through a form of(monogamous) marriage while being married already.

The point is a general one. Not all laws require or prohibit someaction on pain of penalties. As H.L.A. Hart has emphasized and as Razreiterates, 186 some laws simply specify the way in which a power may beexercised if a change in legal relations is to be brought about. People canwrite out testaments and go through ceremonies to their hearts' content;but they will not have succeeded in making a will or getting married, in alegal sense, unless they go through the proper formalities. "7 In thissense, the laws are not directly coercive.

In his discussion of this issue, Hart considered the objection thatlaws of this kind might be seen as fragments of wider laws which arecoercive.188 There is no coercive rule that everyone must make a will,nor is there a ban on unattested testaments; but the rules for makingvalid wills function as fragments of a larger rule, which governs (coer-cively) who may and who may not use or have particular pieces of prop-erty. For example, the reason my sister is not allowed to use this writingdesk without my permission is that my father made a valid bequest of itto me; had his bequest been invalid, I might not have the right to controlthe desk in that way. The rules about bequests are parts of wider rulesthat determine who is entitled to use what, just as the rules about mar-riage are, among other things, part of a wider set of rules governing whocan claim financial support from whom; and those wider rules are coer-cive. Indeed, it is clear that something like this must be the case. Theonly reason why it matters that one's bequests be valid or one's marriageproperly solemnized is that bequest and marriage have some further legaleffect. Ultimately, that effect consists in the way they affect the coerciveoperation of the law.

185. See I. KANT, THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW: AN EXPOSITION OF THE FUNDAMENTAL PRIN-

CIPLES OF JURISPRUDENCE AS THE SCIENCE OF RIGHT 111-12 (W. Hastie ed. 1887).186. J. RAZ, supra note 8, at 352.187. H.L.A. HART, THE CONCEPT OF LAW 27-41 (1961).

188. Id. at 35.

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What, then, does the legal preference for monogamy over polygamyinvolve? The fact is that the law gives the one kind of relationship acertain status and effect elsewhere in the system which it denies to theother. If I go through the proper ceremony, then my monogamous rela-tionship. with my lover takes on a powerful significance in law, for allsorts of purposes ranging from tax benefits to alimony to visiting andconsent rights in hospitals. But I and my several lovers can go throughall the ceremonies we please, and our polygamous relationship will neverbe given that special legal status or effect. No matter how hard we try,we will be treated like any other band of people who are roomingtogether for the time being. (The same is true of monogamous relation-ships between homosexuals, and so on.)

Is this a threat to autonomy? It is, and for roughly the same reasonsthat we found taxes and subsidies objectionable. The decision to favorone type of relationship with a legal framework but not another artifi-cially distorts people's estimate of which sort of relationship is morallypreferable. Let me explain.

Everyone who chooses to live with another and to make a lifetogether has to contemplate the possibility that things may go wrong.The relationship may break up or one of the partners may die, and thenproperty and financial entanglements will have to be sorted out. One ofthe partners may fall ill, and medical staff may have to decide whoshould make decisions about the patient's well-being, and who shouldhave visiting rights when these must be restricted. Even if things do notgo wrong, they may be complicated. A child may be born, and questionswill then arise about who should take care of it and make decisions aboutits future. The people in the household must be taxed, and questionsmay arise about how their incomes should be determined, and so on.Everyone contemplating entering a relationship of whatever sort ought togive some attention to these problems."8 9 And, if they are considering,for example, living in a menage a trois, they must give some considera-tion to the possibility that these problems may be intrinsically more com-plicated for them to sort out than for a couple. These are the sorts ofmoral factors people should appeal to in determining whether polygamyis preferable to monogamy.

The government has decided on the basis of its estimate of thesefactors to distort the matter by making it even easier for monogamouscouples to sort these problems out than for polygamists. Monogamous

189. See also Waldron, supra note 67, passim (it is a necessity that people have something to fallback on if an attachment fails).

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couples have a framework to appeal to, and a set of familiar and wellunderstood rules and procedures for. dealing with these matters.Polygamists have none of these benefits and therefore someone contem-plating the choice has to consider this further factor. Apart from thelegal institution of marriage, problems in monogamy are arguably easierto sort out than those in polygamy; but, the existence of the legal institu-tion means that the "arguably" disappears, and monogamy becomes infi-nitely more straightforward. Once again, as we saw in the case of taxesand subsidies, the state insults its citizens by doing their moral calcula-tions for them, and using the results as a justification for making thecitizens' own calculations easier than they should be.

V. CONCLUSION

None of this adds up to a conclusive case against perfectionism.Raz may be right that there are some forms of political action which maylegitimately be used in the service of perfectionist ideals.' 9 ' But I hope Ihave been able to say something to indicate the complexity of the misgiv-ings that mainstream liberals feel about political action in this area. Thestate may not show its guns when it takes such action. But ultimately itis what it is on account of its guns, and there seems to be some specialinsult involved in its taking advantage of that sort of position to do ourmoral thinking for us. I hope it is also clear how much of this critiquedepends precisely on the conception of autonomy that Raz developed.Without Raz's account of the relation between moral choice, self-author-ship, and the plurality of options, the points I have made about manipu-lation and moral thinking would not have been nearly so clear to me.

Near the end of the book, Raz mentions a number of practical andpolitical difficulties which might impede the prospects for liberal perfec-tionism.' Particular governments may be morally inept; power maycorrupt; freedom may be so fragile that the symbolism of any govern-mental action to promote an ideal becomes problematic; society may beso divided that perfectionist policies may lead to civil strife. These are allthings to bear in mind, and Raz is right to be unashamed of the vulnera-bility of his argument to such empirical considerations. But he is rightalso to insist that the main philosophical issue is deeper than this, andthat is the ground on which I have tried to meet his case.

190. J. RAz, supra note 8, at 420.191. Id. at 424-29.

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Analysis - Joseph Raz theory on Perfectionalism and Autonomy