Joseph Raz per non anglofoni : una guida alla lettura

Abstract

Joseph Raz is among the most celebrated and influential scholars in the Anglophone legal-philosophical debate. This author’s thought occupies a less central place in Italy and, more generally, in the non-Anglophone world. Beginning with a reconstruction of the causes that produced this difference, this essay proposes a wide-ranging – and, for this reason, necessarily partial and superficial – reconstruction of Raz’s thought and its main problematic cores. In particular, the following will be critically discussed: 1) the Razian notion of “reason for action”; 2) the distinction between reasons of different levels; 3) the notion of authority and its relevance to law; and, finally, 4) the way Raz reconstructs the relations between law and morality. In general, one can view Raz’s thought as an attempt to defend through moral arguments an a-moral law, that is, a law whose individuation prescinds (must prescind) from moral criteria. Raz’s is perhaps the best possible version of legal positivism in a historical period when this legal-philosophical perspective no longer expresses the esprit du temps.