In
Justice for Hedgehogs (
JH)
, Ronald Dworkin has written a truly remarkable philosophical work.
[1]
It advances a bold treatment of all the fundamental issues in
meta-ethics, moral epistemology, ethics, and political theory. The work
is systematic not just in the broad sweep of its subject matter, but in
its defense of an economical set of substantive principles that informs
each part of Dworkin's story and integrates them into a striking account
of ethical life as a whole. Dworkin's central principles assert (1) the
independence of moral judgments, (2) the
unity of moral values, and (3) the
interpretive
character of these values. His principle of independence advances the
claim that moral convictions are true or false, and are established as
such by modes of reasoning that invoke other moral values in a framework
that is independent of empirical, scientific, or metaphysical inquiry.
Thus moral truths cannot be dislodged by empirical or metaphysical
truths. Dworkin's principle of the unity of value advances an account of
values (e.g., the good life, duties to others) in which these values
are not in conflict, but support each other. The third principle
concerning the interpretive character of moral values argues that their
meaning requires an 'interpretation' that aims to identify their moral
ground and implications. Dworkin's account of interpretation takes aim
against the view that moral concepts possess criteria which philosophers
can discover through analysis, then utilize to guide moral decisions.
Instead, ethical inquiry should abandon the quest to define the meaning,
logic, or function of moral language and seek value-laden
interpretations of moral concepts that determine their application to
cases.
Dworkin attempts to defend these three principles in a wide variety of
contexts, a task daunting but engaging. The book is extremely
well-written, in a conversational style that invites readers into the
narrative and suggests other paths they may want to take. In this
review, I provide an account of some of Dworkin's most provocative
arguments. My focus will center on his notion of interpretation and his
conceptions of ethics ('living well'), morality ('duties of others'),
and politics ('political rights, equality, liberty, democracy, and
law'), as his practical conceptions provide the best test of his
accounts of moral truth and interpretation.
1. The Independence of Value (23-94)
Half of
JH is devoted to a meta-ethical inquiry (23-191) in
which Dworkin establishes the autonomy of moral judgment, true moral
convictions as the aim of such judgment, and 'interpretation' as the
sole and sufficient guide to truths about value. His aim in defending
the 'independence' of value judgments is (1) to vindicate 'the ordinary'
view that moral convictions are straightforwardly true or false, and
(2) to defeat skeptical arguments against the possibility of moral
truths. He seeks to demonstrate that the practice of making moral
judgments, and of defending them, forms a self-sufficient framework
independent of scientific standards of proof and the verdict of fact.
Dworkin defends the common sense view that moral judgments involve
assertions about value which are straightforwardly true or false. When
we assert that torture is wrong, we mean that torture is really, truly,
objectively wrong. We may also be expressing disapproval or a
prescription for conduct. But we do so by doing something else:
expressing a belief about the action which grounds the emotion or
prescription. We may also seek to explain a moral belief, or why people
hold it -- the aim of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, etc.
Such explanations of moral convictions do not bear on their truth or
falsity; this is what makes them moral convictions. Making a case for
our moral convictions requires an appeal to other moral convictions. Are
these sources sufficient to make one's moral convictions true? While
Dworkin's answer awaits his account of interpretation, the burden of his
argument concerning the independence of moral judgment is to neutralize
various forms of skepticism about moral truth.
Dworkin distinguishes an 'internal' skepticism from an 'external' form.
Internal skeptics draw on some moral convictions to undermine our
belief in the truth or falsity of others, whereas external skeptics seek
to stand outside
every framework of moral convictions in order to raise doubts about
all
of them. 'Partial Error' skeptics utilize some moral convictions in
order to challenge the credibility of others. Such a skeptic may
challenge the credibility of all moral convictions concerning voluntary
homosexual behavior on the basis of a more general conviction concerning
the features of acts that make them wrong or obligatory and the
conviction that voluntary sexual choices lack these wrong-making (or
right-making) features. Because such general moral convictions may be
true, partial-error skeptics get it right in certain cases. 'Global
Internal' skeptics aim to defeat the credibility of all first-order
moral judgments on the basis of a second-order moral claim concerning
the entire class. These skeptics may hold that all moral convictions
concerning persons' behavior are neither true nor false because human
behavior is always caused by events beyond human control and it is wrong
to hold people morally responsible for choices they cannot avoid.
Global internal skeptics may deny the credibility of all universal moral
principles (they are neither true nor false) on the basis of the moral
conviction that right and wrong -- what is true or false -- is entirely
relative to the culture of particular peoples. Dworkin does not
challenge internal skepticism as a whole because internal skeptics
always assume the truth of some moral convictions that can be evaluated
on the terrain of interpretation.
Not so with 'external skepticism', which he treats as a deadly
affliction of academic philosophers and 'post-modern' intellectuals.
Because external skeptics seek a non-moral account of moral convictions,
their project is a non-starter, a founding mistake rooted in
incomprehension of the independence of moral convictions. Dworkin argues
that external skepticism reduces to internal skepticism and thus stands
or falls on the basis of the moral convictions on which it tacitly
depends. Consider the skeptic who argues that moral truths require the
existence of moral facts or properties. Because there are no such moral
facts, it follows that there are no moral truths. On Dworkin's reading,
this skeptical argument depends on the moral conviction that were there
moral facts and properties in the world, humans would have those moral
obligations that correspond to them. Consider any external skeptic who
denies the existence of moral obligations. Such a skeptical position
contradicts moral convictions which assert that certain acts are morally
prohibited and others morally required. This is itself a moral
conviction fraught with ethical significance. External skepticism rests
on an untenable dichotomy separating meta-ethical claims about moral
judgments from moral judgments themselves.
External skeptics may reject this stance because they think it is
question-begging or trades on a bogus notion of what counts as a 'moral'
conviction. Dworkin's arguments force us to examine the assumptions of
skeptical arguments and recognize that evaluating these assumptions
already engages us in the web of moral judgments. Dworkin shifts the
burden of argument onto skeptics and meta-ethical theorists who would
deny the independence of value. There is a wealth of additional
arguments (concerning causation, motivation, supervenience, etc.) which
support the core idea that 'morality stands or falls on its own
credentials'. But how do particular moral claims stand or fall? These
problems lead to Dworkin's account of 'interpretation.'
2. Interpretation and Moral Responsibility (94-123)
Dworkin treats interpretation as a practice in the lives of individuals
essential to the achievement of moral responsibility. His account of
ethics begins with a view of agents who take responsibility for acting
on moral convictions and interpreting what they imply in concrete
settings of life. Agents fail their moral responsibility when they lack
moral convictions, violate them, invoke them insincerely or
hypocritically, bend them to their self-interest, or compromise them in
myriad ways. Agents fail their responsibility to actively interpret
their moral convictions when they act thoughtlessly, inconsistently,
whimsically, impulsively, arbitrarily, or unreflectively. The practice
of interpretation is essential because our ethical values are general,
abstract, and unordered; they need to be applied in order to determine
the truth concerning what they ought to do in local circumstances. But
one's present situation may evoke diverse moral convictions. Agents bear
the responsibility to create integrity and unity among their moral
convictions and by so doing actualize their own integrity and
authenticity. The act of interpretation is central to moral life and the
virtues of moral agents.
The practice of interpretation seeks true moral claims as its intrinsic
goal. A necessary condition for true moral convictions is that these
convictions, and the agent who embraces them, reconcile and unify what
appear to be conflicting values. Dworkin defends a 'full value holism'
and a principle of 'the unity of value'. Our moral convictions and
values form a coherent whole -- a mutually reinforcing system in which
every 'true' value coheres with and supports every other true value. But
this coherence is not pre-ordained, static. It is made, not found,
through the practice of interpretation. The best interpretation of our
moral convictions creates mutual support among them. The truth of a
moral conviction depends on the case that can be made for it, in light
of other moral convictions taken to be true, and depends on its power to
introduce the unity of value characterized above.
How can Dworkin deny the phenomenon of conflict between values? Take
the example of deciding what to tell a colleague concerning her book.
Isn't it obvious that the values of honesty and kindness conflict in
such a case? For Dworkin, this situation simply sets up the problem of
interpretation central to responsible moral life. 'Honesty' and
'kindness' do not conflict until we determine what each of these values
means, how it speaks to the case at hand. An agent tries to create a
kind way of being honest, and an honest way of being kind -- perhaps
supported by the sense that dishonest kindness is patronizing, or a
false kindness, and unkind honesty is demeaning or insulting. A true
moral conviction about such a case generates a unity of the values at
stake.
The remainder of Part 2 develops accounts of interpretation 'in
general' as a practice in various fields (123-157); and the
interpretation of moral concepts (157-191).
3. Interpretation in General
Dworkin's discussion of interpretive judgment covers various fields of
inquiry. First he argues that all interpretation seeks true judgments
concerning the objects of interpretation; e.g., truths about the meaning
of a poem. Secondly, he advances the view that all interpretation is a
value-laden practice in that it makes judgments about (1) the value of
the object being interpreted and (2) the value of interpretation itself
in a given domain of inquiry. Interpretations of the meaning of a poem
involve judgments concerning what gives that poem its value and gives
the practice of interpreting poetry its value. What determines the
credibility of such judgments? Such judgments presuppose a tradition of
interpretation and make claims concerning the aims and standards of
interpretation in that tradition. Dworkin draws a sharp line between
interpretation and scientific inquiry. Interpretation is value-laden in
that the standards of success governing interpretive judgments depend on
the best understanding of the value or point of interpretation in some
tradition. Scientific claims are not value-laden in this way because
their success or truthfulness is not similarly dependent on an
interpretation of the value of scientific inquiry. Dworkin holds that
the
intrinsic goal of science is truth (true theories, laws, etc.) and that
alone provides 'the' standard of success.
Dworkin's dichotomy of interpretive and scientific judgments embodies a
familiar conception of science which can no longer be taken for
granted. Post-positivist philosophers have argued that the goals of
science require interpretation and that standards of success require the
best understanding of these goals. Some claim that scientific inquiry
cannot attain true theories of unobservables and must satisfy itself
with predictive success. Others who hold that theoretical truths are the
goal of science disagree over whether this goal requires explanatory
success or mere predictive success, and whether true theories need to
embody ideals of simplicity, unification, consilience, internal
consistency, coherence with other theories, etc. It would be difficult
to understand these debates as anything other than rival interpretations
of the goal of science -- on a par with rival interpretations of the
point of literary criticism or moral philosophy. The odd result is that
Dworkin's conception of interpretation may have wider scope than he
imagines, covering scientific judgment and its framework of epistemic
values.
4. The Interpretation of Moral Concepts (166-188)
Dworkin defends an account of moral inquiry as a practice of
interpreting central normative concepts, such as responsibility, duty,
and justice. His defense of this interpretative model rests on a key
claim that such moral concepts are essentially 'interpretive concepts',
sharply distinguished from 'criterial concepts'. Criterial concepts are
ones whose meaning is governed by defining criteria -- properties that
provide a decisive test for determining whether or not something is an
instance of the concept, e.g., the concept of a triangle, bank, or book.
When people disagree concerning the application of such a concept, it
is a disagreement over whether the particular in fact satisfies the
criteria. Are all moral concepts criterial? Dworkin answers that moral
concepts are used
without criteria. Such concepts are interpretive and their application to cases is contestable.
Dworkin's interpretive conception implies a powerful alternative to
meta-ethical inquiry as a quest to produce analyses, definitions, and
criteria for key moral and legal concepts, which are neutral concerning
the value at stake in these concepts. Any attempt to get at them through
a value-neutral analysis of their meaning or criteria is a non-starter,
misguided from the get-go! Any definition of justice or the good life
is in reality a moral interpretation of how we should understand them,
staking out a position concerning what is valuable in the ideal.
Dworkin's model of value-laden interpretation is just as skeptical about
the quest for value-free analyses of 'moral reasoning' or
justification. Giving an interpretation of them would require providing
an evaluation of the values at stake in these activities, as Dworkin has
done in arguing that such activity is essential to a morally
responsible agent and thus ethical life itself.
Can moral interpretation ground a single true account of justice?
Dworkin treats truth as an interpretive concept, not a criterial one.
Because this claim must apply to scientific truth, it supports the
criticism I advance above, that interpretive and scientific inquires
cannot be sharply distinguished on the ground that science does not
require interpretation of its goal(s) -- even if we take truth to be the
goal. Dworkin holds that interpretations of truth claims in various
areas of inquiry must interpret the value of truth in these areas of
practice. He presents a persuasive case that the correspondence theory
of truth fails this interpretive test. But is there any general
interpretation of the concept of truth and its value across different
domains of inquiry?
Dworkin advances the interpretive hypothesis that truth is whatever
convictions constitute the best solution to the problems central to a
domain of inquiry. Truth is the result of 'successful inquiry' and
interpretation of the goals and standards of the inquiry. This
interpretation of truth justifies a reasonable internal skepticism or
relativism concerning the truths available in a given context. Can we
expect one true interpretation of the meaning-cum-value of
Hamlet?
While it is possible, often a director of the play seeks to find the
interpretation which will work best for a specific time, place, and
audience. This phenomenon may ground an 'internal' skepticism or
relativism concerning 'the' meaning of the play, independent of context.
It is a virtue of Dworkin's framework of interpretation that he
explains how some claims of internal skepticism are justified without
calling into question the veracity of
all interpretive judgments in a domain.
5. Ethics (191-255)
Dworkin interprets moral life as composed of three interrelated areas
of inquiry: Ethics concerns the question of how persons ought to live if
they are to 'live well' and have 'a good life'. Morals deals with the
question of how persons ought to treat one another, and their duties in
this regard. Politics deals with what the members of a political
community owe to one another. The three last parts of
JH seek
interpretations of these ethical, moral, and political concepts that
support Dworkin's principle of 'the unity of value' and overcome
apparent conflicts between them. His interpretive strategy aims to
reconcile the alleged conflict between self-interest ('living well') and
morality (duties to others), and thus the conundrum of "Why should
anyone be moral?" His interpretation of political concepts seeks to
reconcile the values of liberty and equality, which are often taken to
conflict. The danger in this approach is that conflicts are circumvented
by fiat -- arbitrary characterizations of values that are tailored to
generate harmony. But Dworkin's conception of value-laden interpretation
aims to show that there are certain core values -- principles of human
dignity -- that undergird familiar ideals and provide them with a unity
of mutual support.
Ethics requires that we interpret the notion of 'living well' and
having 'a good life'. Dworkin's interpretation of these concepts is
readily intelligible if we recall that all moral choice depends on
ethical responsibility -- which in turn requires that persons interpret
and act on moral convictions concerning what makes life worth living.
Living well is a moral responsibility of individuals and a continuing
exercise of this responsibility. It is a process and 'performance', not
an end-state or static condition of character. Living well depends on
whether the things one desires are worthy of desire and possess an
objective value, apart from the preferences and pleasure embodied in
them. Living well is not identical with having a good life, though it
involves striving for a good life. One may live well but fall short of a
good life due to bad luck, futile efforts, gambles that fail to pay
off, accidents and calamities, illness, bad timing. Living well is thus
not the same as a successful life, and can involve choices that
jeopardize success. On the other hand, the ideal of a good life fails to
imply that of living well. On Dworkin's interpretation of living well, a
person who attains genuine personal goods through a pattern of
deception, cheating, harming others, or neglecting basic obligations
fails to live well, even through she may have a good or better life as a
result. The value of living well is more fundamental to ethics than a
good life, on the basis of the underlying value of ethical
responsibility. Living well is a central exercise of one's ethical
responsibility, just as living less well or badly in order to obtain a
good life is a failure of one's ethical responsibility.
Dworkin's interpretations connect moral virtues (honesty, fair play,
respect for others) to the concept of living well, while disconnecting
them from the notion of a good life. This is puzzling. Living well is
supposed to involve the striving for a good life and both require the
pursuit of objectively valuable goods. Presumably honesty, fairness,
integrity, sincerity, and respect for others are objectively valuable
goods and part of what one strives for in the attempt to live well. Why
then are they excluded from Dworkin's interpretation of a good life? The
result is a disunity of value because his notion of a good life will
support implications for behavior that directly contradict the
implications of his interpretation of living well. This result
reintroduces the conflict between 'self-interest' and 'morality' that
Dworkin aims to overcome through interpretation supporting the unity of
value.
But Dworkin further grounds this interpretive scheme by making human
dignity central to living well -- and on this basis, reading morality
into the conditions of living well. This interpretation of human dignity
as the ground of both ethical and moral value -- living well and
respecting duties to others -- provides Dworkin's desired unity,
integrity of fit, between these two values. But does this interpretation
of human dignity explain why the notion of a good life does not also
require a life of dignity? The price of disconnecting the concept of a
good life from human dignity may be a disunity between the value of a
good life and
both that of living well
and moral duties to others.
Living well implies a conception of human dignity which Dworkin
interprets to involve ideals of self-respect and authenticity.
Authenticity is taking responsibility for making one's own moral
judgments and accepting accountability for acting consistently on them.
Living well also involves self-respect -- an attitude one takes to one's
life and self. Dworkin distinguishes 'appraisal' from 'recognition'
respect. Appraisal respect is the respect that one accords oneself or
others on the basis of individual achievements and traits. Recognition
respect does not depend on such appraisals. Dworkin interprets it as an
attitude of caring how one lives, recognizing the objective value of
living well, and living in light of a conception of the sort of person
one aspires to be. This condition of self-respect already suggests how
living well may require moral virtues and duties, insofar as they enter
into a person's self-image.
But is recognition respect by itself sufficient for self-respect and
living well -- in the absence of appraisal respect? Consider a person
who cares about living well and has a conception of the sort of person
she aspires to be, but is an abysmal failure in living up to the
conception and thus lacks all appraisal respect. This person may lose
all trace of self-respect and living well. Under these circumstances,
having the right attitude towards oneself -- 'recognition respect' --
still allows any tangible self-respect to simply dissolve. We must be
mindful of Dworkin's point that living well does not require the sorts
of achievements and 'success' implied by 'a good life'. Living well and
possessing recognition respect requires living for the right things, not
necessarily success in attaining them.
But notice that a person who lives and acts 'for the right things', or
objective values, necessarily manifests particular character traits such
as discipline, consistency, perseverance, integrity, etc., that are
objects of appraisal respect. Furthermore, on Dworkin's interpretation,
living well requires that one seeks goods -- a good life -- without
resorting to deception, cheating, harming others, immoral or evil acts.
Thus, recognizable moral virtues are required by living well, but these
virtues or their opposite -- moral vices -- are important bases of
appraisal-respect. It seems that Dworkin needs a more robust
interpretation of self-respect to achieve consistency with the role he
gives to moral virtue and duty within his account of living well.
Recognition respect, by itself, seems insufficient for self-respect and
human dignity.
6. Morality and Duties to Others (255-327)
Dworkin's interpretation of duties to others aims to establish the
unity of value. He argues that the best interpretation of 'living well'
will yield a way to identify and ground our duties to others. The notion
of living well is interpreted to require human dignity and related
principles of self-respect and authenticity. Self-respect implies that I
recognize the objective value of my life and living well. Dworkin sees
such self-respect as requiring that I extend respect to the lives of all
other persons. Recognizing that my living well is important, because
living well is intrinsically and objectively important, will entail
recognizing the objective and equal importance of all others' living
well and maintaining self-respect.
But my living well is also a subjective value for me in ways that
others' lives need not be. That is, I can respect others and hold that
their lives are objectively important without taking the same interest
in their lives that I take in my own. This is not primarily a
psychological truism, but an interpretation of the notion of living
well. Living well is the ethical responsibility of the person whose life
is at stake. I am the person who has the most control over my life, and
thus it is fitting that I am the one who takes primary responsibility
for living well ('authenticity'). Yet at the same time, my dignity
grounds the recognition that the lives of others and their self-respect
possess equal and objective importance, so that they ought not be a
matter of indifference to me. This ethical framework sets the key
interpretive challenge: What duties to others are implied by the respect
I owe them as a condition of my own dignity, consistent with the
ethical responsibility each has for her own life?
Dworkin reads this interpretive problem as the apparent conflict
between the two principles of human dignity -- (1) self-respect,
implying the equal objective importance of everyone's life, and (2)
authenticity, or each person taking individual ethical responsibility
for her own life. He calls (1) 'the equal importance principle' and (2)
'the responsibility principle'. The first may imply that I share my
resources equally among persons because their lives are just as valuable
as mine. The second may imply that I ought to keep whatever resources I
need to fulfill my personal responsibility to live well. Dworkin
rejects the idea that a compromise must be struck between them.
Interpretation seeks a unity or relation of mutual support between them.
How? By creating an interpretation of their practical implications such
that both principles are satisfied and unified. Such interpretations
are value-laden because they require value judgments concerning the
content which we ought to give to both principles of dignity.
What duties do we have to give aid to strangers in need? Dworkin
interprets the equal importance principle and the personal
responsibility principle to determine the extent of these duties. How
serious a threat to a person's life or power to live well does the
person face in the situation? The importance principle focuses the
agent's judgment on the impact of action or inaction on the life of the
person in need. What sort of cost does an agent face if she provides
aid? The responsibility principle focuses the agent's judgment on the
impact of giving aid on her own life. How directly is the agent
confronted by the victim's need? If someone is dying right before one's
eyes, turning one's back expresses an indifference to the value of human
life that would not be evident were the agent far more removed in time
and place.
A critic may hold that Dworkin's morality of aid simply reduces to (1) a
trade-off between the importance of others' lives and responsibility
for one's own life based on (2) a metric of three variables: risk to
victim, cost to agent, and immediacy of relationships. But Dworkin
rejects any general metric that assigns weights to these considerations
in advance of a context where an act of moral interpretation is required
to give them their proper due. Similarly, there can be no trade-off
between the importance and responsibility principles. Such a trade-off
would have to fix the meaning and implications of each of these values
in the abstract before they are applied to concrete situations. Acts of
interpretive judgment determine how these values should be applied, to
give values meaning and generate true moral convictions concerning
duties of aid. The unity of value is exhibited when an agent finds a way
to act that simultaneously embodies a due regard for the importance of
others' lives and, at the same time, for one's personal responsibility
for her own life. When an agent finds a way to act that brings together
the value of others' lives and responsibility for her own, she affirms
her dignity and self-respect through the respect accorded the lives of
others and she affirms the respect owed to others' lives through the
respect she accords her own life. A successful interpretation of one's
duty to aid another 'unifies' the components or conditions of human
dignity into a mutually reinforcing whole in a single moral act. This is
a striking and inspiring result of Dworkin's interpretive paradigm of
the unity of value!
How about the duty not to harm or injure others? Is it worse to
deliberately kill another than to let him or her die? What is the moral
difference between deliberate injury to others and 'competition harm' --
the setbacks some suffer as the result of others' success in a
competitive pursuit? Competition harm constitutes no wrong because it is
the inevitable result of human dignity -- the principle that each of us
takes personal responsibility for her own life and does her best to
succeed. Deliberate injury constitutes a wrongful harm because it
deprives others of their human dignity, which requires that they alone
exercise personal responsibility and individual control over their own
bodies, persons, property. Moral injuries transgress the boundaries in
which human dignity can survive.
Dworkin also appeals to his conception of human dignity to account for
the moral distinctions between killing a person and letting him die:
acts and omissions -- the stringent duty that prohibits deliberate
injury and the lesser duty to come to others' aid. The consequence of
these acts may be equally deleterious. But deliberate killing and injury
are an assault on the dignity of the victim, whereas the failure to
provide aid is not such an assault, even when it is wrong. But here we
must recall that the duties of aid are also supposed to rest on human
dignity -- in particular the principle of self-respect and thus respect
for the objective importance of others' lives. Thus the refusal to
provide aid at little cost to oneself may embody an indifference to the
worth of another's life and thus her dignity. Dworkin's rich
interpretation of the principles of human dignity seems to blunt his
sharp account of the difference between acts and omissions.
Dworkin employs his reading of human dignity to provide illuminating
interpretations of obligations rooted in voluntary commitments
(promises) and special associational relations (bonds of family, etc.,
300-324).
7. Political Morality (327-417)
What do the members of a political community owe to one another?
Dworkin focuses on the concept of individual rights because they provide
the bases of a political community's obligations to its members. He
understands political rights as protections of interests of persons that
are so weighty that they trump other social goals, such as economic
growth. The problem is how to identify these interests and political
rights.
Dworkin's unity of value thesis is embodied in his argument that
political rights are grounded in the same principles of human dignity
which underlie ethics and duties to others. In the political context,
these principles are interpreted to ground a universal right to equal
concern and to equal respect. The right to equal concern, or 'equality',
is grounded in the right of all persons to have their lives treated as
equally valuable. The right to equal respect is grounded in the right of
all persons to exercise personal responsibility over their own lives --
which in the political context implies certain basic liberties for all.
If successful, Dworkin's project will unify all of morality on the
basis of interpretations which make human dignity the common origin of
all its various duties and rights. To this end, he must also show that
the dignity principles provide 'the best way' to resolve conflicts
between equality and liberty, unifying these political values.
Political thinkers commonly treat liberty and equality as intrinsic
values which conflict and require trade-offs. This view fails to
understand that liberty and equality are 'interpretive', not 'criterial'
concepts; they do not possess fixed meanings and criteria prior to the
act of interpretation. Secondly, the above view fails in treating
liberty and equality as fundamental intrinsic values, independent and
opposed, which violates our moral convictions in the following way.
Suppose we analyze liberty as doing whatever one wants, free from legal
coercion. We do not regard this liberty as an intrinsic or fundamental
value because the liberty to rape, batter, steal, defraud, cheat, etc.
are legally sanctioned and not objects of value. Why do we value certain
liberties and not others? To answer this question we require an
interpretation that identifies some more fundamental value that
underlies and fixes the value of liberty and thus can determine which
concrete liberties have this value and which do not. Dworkin extends
this argument to show that 'equality', and also 'democracy', are
interpretive concepts.
Dworkin rests his interpretation of liberty and basic political right
on the ideal of respect for each person's responsibility for her own
life -- a key requirement of human dignity. Respect for personal
responsibility identifies and grounds (1) some measure of
self-government -- political rights that empower individuals to
participate in the collective decisions through which their lives are
governed ('positive liberty'); and (2) some measure of freedom from
collective decisions concerning aspects of persons' lives over which
they alone should be making decisions for themselves ('negative
liberty'). Basic civil liberties -- freedoms from legal or political
coercion -- are worked out by identifying practices of coercion which
violate or degrade persons' responsibility for their own lives and
practices which do not. For example, religious freedom is based on an
interpretation of personal responsibility that implies 'ethical
independence.' Religious persecution denies persons their freedom to
decide matters central to their ethical independence. Other instances of
coercion are wrong because they are justified by ethical convictions
which are rejected by some members of the political community and
compromise their ethical independence. The appeal to ethical
independence allows Dworkin to identify and justify familiar liberal
rights -- freedom of speech, artistic freedom, freedom of association,
sexual liberty, etc. Other instances of legal coercion are just because
they do not undermine ethical independence, such as the legal
prohibition of theft, assault, and pollution, or the legal requirement
of seatbelts, car insurance, and building codes.
The unity of political morality depends on the fit and mutual support
that obtains between liberty and equality. Given the underlying value of
human dignity, there is no guarantee that its two components -- equal
concern for the value of all citizens' lives and equal respect for their
responsibility for their lives -- will be mutually reinforcing when
applied to questions of liberty and equality. The problem is that any
scheme of equality of goods or resources would seem to diminish
individual responsibility for the attainment of these goods, bringing
inequality in its wake. Dworkin argues that a libertarian standpoint
sacrifices an equal concern for the value of persons' lives on the basis
of a distorted view of the role of individual responsibility in free
market distributions. Welfarist theories seek to absolutize the equal
concern principle by favoring distributions that generate equal
happiness, capabilities, or opportunities for wellbeing. But these
approaches violate the principle of respect for personal responsibility
because they deny persons' responsibility for developing their own
notions of wellbeing and the choices they make to achieve them. The
upshot is that equal concern should focus on resources of general value
such as wealth because their distribution allows personal responsibility
for determining one's ends or notion of well-being, as well as the
conduct one chooses to use such resources to attain one's ends.
Rawls' conception of primary social goods is a prominent paradigm of
this approach. From his standpoint, equality is a function of how
society distributes goods like income which are both (1) all-purpose
means to the free choice and successful pursuit of one's conception of
the good and (2) compatible with personal responsibility for one's
conception of the good and its achievement. Dworkin's conception of
equality depends on hypothetical decisions we might make in highly
imaginary circumstances. We are to imagine that we are shipwrecked on an
island with diverse natural resources and are each given an equal
number of tokens with which to bid for these resources in an open
auction. The auction ends when each has used up her tokens as
effectively as possible and no one would trade her package of resources
for anyone else's. The resulting distribution may not be one in which
any particular resource is distributed equally. But this distribution
provides an interpretation of the equal concern and equal respect
principles of human dignity: equal concern because each starts with an
equal share of tokens, and equal respect because each is responsible for
the choice of resources she ends up with and the ends she hopes to
pursue with these resources. On the other hand, a command or socialist
economy is one where government decides the distribution of prices,
wages, and resources. But it would have to deny the principle of equal
respect because it would determine the notion of human wellbeing and the
resources most valuable to different individuals, which rather should
be determined by the exercise of personal responsibility. A just
distribution of resources requires
some form of a free market, capitalist economy: indeed, an egalitarian form.
But for Dworkin the distribution of resources that obtains in the above
desert island auction does not attain a stable justice that accords
with human dignity for two reasons. First, ongoing market relations
require legal regulation to correct injustices rooted in monopolies and
externalities. For example, investment bankers make highly risky
decisions that harm the value of assets held by people with no control
over these decisions. Similarly, market forces generate the harms of
pollution and global warming which degrade the resources and lives of
persons who are not responsible for them. Secondly, even though an
equality of resources results from the desert island auction, in real
life this equality degenerates due to bad luck, illness, market
fluctuations, or differences in talent, which create inegalitarian
distributions not based on individual choice and responsibility.
How do we discount the effects of bad luck on the distribution of
resources, while preserving respect for personal responsibility?
Dworkin's answer is to imagine that insurance against bad luck and low
income is also a resource at stake in the desert island auction. He then
imagines what level of insurance people would purchase with their equal
tokens under ideal conditions of knowledge and equality of risk. There
is a high degree of uncertainty in any answer, he concedes, but we may
assume that there is some minimal level of coverage all would choose and
be willing to subsidize. This hypothetical insurance scheme is supposed
to assure an equality of resources that meets the principles of equal
concern and equal respect.
Dworkin's turn to an interpretation of equality that relies on
imaginary, hypothetical constructs makes it difficult to know how
resources will in fact be distributed, or what resources would be
chosen. In the case of his interpretation of liberty, we know that
certain specific civil and political liberties are implied. But what
distribution of which resources is implied by his interpretation of
equality? Lacking a clear answer to this question, we cannot judge
whether he succeeds in unifying the values of liberty and equality, and
thus political morality as a whole. Consider the conflicts between
liberty and equality which may arise from the requirement that all agree
to subsidize a minimal monetary level of coverage for all. Dworkin
assumes that responsible agents will embrace different personal ends and
thus need or value different resources. Such resources will have
different monetary costs and values, thus different prices to insure. If
my resources are less expensive to insure than yours, I may think it
unfair to subsidize a level of coverage for you which I do not need. A
public policy that requires this subsidy may violate the value of
personal responsibility and my freedom to use my resources as I choose.
How then might we assure equal concern for the value of all lives and
some level of equality of resources, but not one which conflicts with
liberty and personal responsibility? In this context, there is a more
straightforward moral interpretation of equal concern that may solve the
problem in a manner that does not require Dworkin's imaginary
circumstances with uncertain outcomes. We might interpret human dignity
and the principle of human concern to imply that each person is
guaranteed a baseline of goods minimally necessary for living well,
however individuals define it, and for cases where they fall below it
through bad luck. This is the familiar idea that a just society based on
equal concern insures its members against poverty, hunger,
homelessness, illiteracy, illness, unemployment, drudgery, idleness,
etc., in a way that respects their responsibility for their own lives.
This moral interpretation of equality may possess the sort of
concreteness that Dworkin needs in order to vindicate the unity of equal
concern with equal respect, equality with liberty.
Dworkin's account of political morality also includes rewarding interpretations of human rights, democracy and law.
8. Conclusion
The heart and soul of Dworkin's work is the argument for the unity of
value which defends an original account of ethics, morality, and
politics. The unity of value rests on Dworkin's paradigm of value-laden
interpretation and a conception of human dignity that places it at the
core of all spheres of value. The paradigm of interpretation powerfully
speaks to the practices of philosophers, but to ordinary moral agents as
well, generating remarkable unity between scholarly interpretation and
the acts of interpretation involved in everyday ethical conduct. Moral
life and its philosophy may both be transformed by the idea that they
are not as well understood as the search for abstract principles or
fixed moral meanings. Rather, we get a better grip if we grasp that our
common values require interpretations to seek out their practical
implications for conduct and reconcile them on the basis of more
fundamental ideals. This creates a deep shift in our understanding of
ethics. The further thought that our values and their implications are
best identified and reconciled on the basis of an underlying ideal of
human dignity should provoke considerable discussion. Dworkin puts flesh
on this ideal and spells out the roles it can serve in dealing with
many problems. His work exhibits a profound moral seriousness that
engages us and breathes fresh life into the task of living and thinking a
good life in a just society. We may be rightfully gratified that at the
onset of the new millennium, there is the bright light of this work to
renew our quest to grasp the human condition.
[1] A longer version of this review is available from the author.
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Julio Cabrera