Summary of the Workshop, The Values of Liberal Democracy: Themes from Joseph Raz's Political Philosophy

On 15–16 April, the Departments of Philosophy and of Political Science hosted a workshop on ‘The Values of Liberal Democracy: Themes from Joseph Raz’s Political Philosophy’. Although the workshop celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The Morality of Freedom, the scope of the conference was broader, honoring Raz’s contributions to political philosophy more generally.

Raz delivered a public lecture on the ‘The Democratic Deficit’: Introductory Reflections on the Legitimacy of International Authorities. He argued that in order to understand the degree to which institutions (including international ones) are legitimate, we need to think about the complex interplay between non-democratic practices, the forms in which democracy produces certain outcomes, and the role that beliefs in the legitimacy of democracy make democratic practices legitimate.

The workshop included a nice mixture of papers by established philosophers and graduate students from CEU, the University of Arizona, EUI, LSE, The University of Warwick, and the University of Sheffield among others. The papers touched on a variety of topics inspired by, and sometimes critical of Raz’s work. The talks covered issues such as the relationship between personal autonomy and distributive equality, different aspects of the service conception of authority, civil disobedience, political authority and the criminal law, questions regarding paternalism, and the prospects of political perfectionism. The workshop was well attended, and attracted the attention to members of CEU’s community as well as of visitors from abroad.