  Oakeshott is less clear about what justice or rightness in civil association is than what it is not. He suggests that the most important consideration in assessing a law's rightness is whether the obligations it prescribes are appropriately imposed, in part because law is inherently coercive (OHC 160; OH 143). That an action is harmful, wrong, or otherwise undesirable is not necessarily a decisive reason to forbid it legally. Whether a state should constrain someone’s choices on such grounds depends on what Oakeshott calls the moral-legal self-understanding of a community (OH 160). If the criteria used in judging the justice of laws are not already embedded in the way a community deliberates legal changes, what is called justice becomes an arbitrary standard that can undermine the rule of law. The defect here arises when we judge a community’s laws according to abstract criteria unrelated to the self-understandings of its members. Here again, Oakeshott's view resembles that of Michael Walzer, who argues that appropriate and effective “social criticism” comes from those who are experienced in the ways of the community they criticize: they are “connected critics” who base their criticism on the community’s own standards. They stand “a little to the side, but not outside” the communities whose practices they criticize (Walzer 1987: 61). The desirability of a law, then, must be judged in relation to the practices of the community. These are not univocal, however, and so the judgments are a matter for continuing debate. Judging well requires a disciplined focus on the obligations a state can properly prescribe. A law might be found wanting, for example, if enforcing it were to require intrusive surveillance. The character of deliberation in a state bearing the character of a civil association is defined by its style more than by its conclusions in particular cases (OH 161).