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What are our duties or rights? How should we act? What are we responsible for? Joseph Raz examines the philosophical issues underlying these everyday questions. He explores the nature of normativity - the reasoning behind certain beliefs and emotions about how we should behave - and offers a novel account of responsibility

Joseph Raz is one of the world's leading philosophers of law, and in his Seeley Lectures he reflects critically on one of the central tenets of ethical thought, the view that values are universal. He concludes that we should try to understand what is and what is not entailed by the universality of values, with such an understanding central to the future hopes of mankind, rather than abandoning the belief altogether. This is a concise humane account of some fundamental questions of social existence. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1305/thumbnail.jpg

The Practice of Value explores the nature of value and its relation to the social and historical conditions under which human agents live. At the core of the book are the Tanner Lectures delivered at Berkeley in 2001 by Joseph Raz, who has been one of the leading figures in moral and legal philosophy since the 1970's. Raz argues that values depend importantly on social practices, but that we can make sense of this dependence without falling back on cultural relativism. In response, three eminent philosophers, Christine Korsgaard, Robert Pippin, and Bernard Williams, offer their own distinctive reflections on the connections between value and practice. The book begins with an introduction by Jay Wallace, setting the scene for what follows, and ends with a response from Raz to his commentators. The result is a fascinating debate, accessible to readers throughout and beyond philosophy, about the relations between human values and human life. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1299/thumbnail.jpg

Why democracy? Institutions of government and others must meet conditions of legitimacy. Why? and what are they? what are principles of legitimacy, like the principle of subsidiarity? and how does democracy fit in a theory of legitimacy? The paper surveys what it takes to be the seven most important advantages of democratic government: civil and political rights, more extensive opportunities for people to engage in public affairs, responsiveness to the expressed preferences of the people, stability, peaceful transfer of power, loyalty and solidarity. It then considers the role of legitimation in securing these advantages. These reflection lead to the question whether other regimes can secure the same advantages? And more importantly: given that all democratic regime rely also on non-democratic institutions, how are we to debate questions like how much democracy is needed? A question which arises within a single regime and in the interaction between several, say national and international, regimes.

The paper provides a broadly sketched argument about the importance of state-law and its limits, and the way current developments in international relations and international law tend to transform it without displacing its key position among legal systems in general. It argues that state law is (at least until present time) the most comprehensive law-based social organization within its domain. A standing which is manifested by acknowledged legitimacy by those subject to it (or many of them) and sovereignty, namely independence or external bodies. The paper argues that globalisation (broadly conceived) and attending developments in international greatly reduce the sovereignty of states, and transform its legitimate authority within its domain. None of this heralds the elimination of the state, but it does affect the character of states, and poses theories of law with new challenges, including the need to take more seriously legal systems that are not systems of state-law.