Justice for Hedgehogs

“The fox knows many things,” said Isaiah Berlin (2013, 1), translating a fragment of Antilochus, “but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” There are those—the foxes, “seers of many things”—who appreciate the plurality of goods, fascinated by values and principles of the most diverse kinds. And then there are the hedgehogs, “who see only one big usually incomplete thing.” The title of Ronald Dworkin's book suggests that he prided himself on falling into the latter category.But Dworkin was a funny sort of hedgehog. He was not a thinker who worried away at the implications of a single monomaniac idea. Dworkin's hedgehog had the most diverse interests imaginable. He worked in the wake of the fox, showing that various ideas that foxes like Berlin regarded as quite separate from one another, like liberty, justice, equality, dignity, legality, religion, art, ethics, democracy, and rights, could in fact be connected together in argument in a way that displayed an important underlying coherence.Dworkin says at the beginning of Justice for Hedgehogs that “the fox has ruled the roost in academic and literary philosophy for many decades...in the Anglo-American tradition” (2). This has been so particularly in political philosophy. Isaiah Berlin was famous for resisting any attempt to establish analytic connections between equality and liberty or between liberty and social justice. He said we should recognize these values as independent of one another and face up to the untidy trade-offs that are involved in trying to keep faith with both of them in a complex world.Ronald Dworkin never accepted this. His own work on equality took seriously the possibility that “Liberty” might be the answer to the question “Equality of what?” just as “Equally” might be the answer to the question “How should liberty be distributed?” The two values might be interlaced, performing different roles in a single complex function. And he went further. His book Sovereign Virtue argued that “any genuine contest between liberty and equality is a contest liberty must lose” (Dworkin 2000, 128). We uphold liberty, when we do, because that is the best way of showing respect for human beings. And he repeats what he said there at the end of Justice for Hedgehogs: there is no plausible way of protecting liberty that can possibly be presented as something separate from and worth trading off against equal concern and respect (429). Cut loose from equal concern and respect, freedom looks like license, not liberty.Or consider another early example: Dworkin's treatment of the supposed antipathy between democracy and individual rights. In Freedom's Law, he argued that insisting on respect for rights, even rights enforced by unelected judges, is not only compatible with a commitment to democracy, but it is the assurance of a condition that makes majoritarian democracy legitimate (Dworkin 1996, 15–26). Majoritarianism has no legitimacy at all except among people who respect one another and are bound together in a community of equal concern. Upholding rights is a way of securing this condition for democracy. So on Dworkin's account, there is no loss to democracy when such a right is upheld by a court because there is no attractive conception of democracy that could plausibly be traded off against that condition. Again, a similar argument is developed in chapter 18 of Justice for Hedgehogs. I am not saying the argument is sound: my point here is about the style of Dworkin's hedgehog. This hedgehog does not reduce one set of values to the other; instead it sees each of them as involved in the most plausible conception of the other.Justice for Hedgehogs is an accumulation of arguments of this kind—dozens of them—each purporting to discern some underlying unity in the supposed independence or antagonism between (say) personal ethics and interpersonal morality, or between moral principles and political morality, or between justice and law. All through the book, what Dworkin does is to look for the implication of value A in the conditions that make it sensible, appropriate, or legitimate to pursue value B. If he can do this, then he can show that there is no version of B that can be sensibly pursued as something worth trading off against value A in the way that completely independent values might be traded off against one another. It is not a point about commensurability, about each of the contestant values embodying a given quantum of some underlying good such as utility. Dworkin is a holist not a monist. He seeks cohesion rather than reduction among our apparently disparate values: “The truth about living well and being good and what is wonderful is not only coherent but mutually supporting: what we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest” (1).Interestingly, he is unwilling to present this cohesion as something we simply discover. He speaks of “the struggle...to create integrity among our convictions,” as though it were something we do. As we develop our values and convictions, some from childhood, some from adult reflection, we face the task of interpreting and developing each of them in the light of the others. “Interpretation knits values together. We are morally responsible to the degree that our various concrete interpretations achieve an overall integrity so that each supports the others in a network of value that we embrace authentically. To the extent that we fail in that interpretive project—and it seems impossible wholly to succeed—we are not acting fully out of conviction, and so we are not fully responsible” (101).Integrity here involves effort and responsibility. In Dworkin's jurisprudence, the term “integrity” refers to the onus on a judge to construct a theory of the whole of law—all the various statutes and precedents—that presents the public standards of the community as expressive of a single coherent scheme of principles. In jurisprudence, Dworkin (1986, 219 and 273) cautions us that “nothing in the way [the] law was produced guarantees [the judge's] success in finding a coherent interpretation of it.” And the same seems to be true of our moral convictions more broadly. It is not a matter of uncovering an integrity that is there objectively, anyway, whether we look for it or not. We have to construct it.Of course Dworkin is not quite in a position to accept that contrast. He does not believe there is any useful metaethical debate to be had about the objective existence of cohesion or, for that matter, about objective moral or ethical truth. All there is, he claims, is the first-level enterprise of engaging with our own and each other's substantive values. We cannot stand back from our convictions and reflect in a detached way about their metaethical status. But by the same token, there is no viable position of metaethical skepticism about all this that wouldn't amount in the end to a first-level refusal to discharge the responsibility of carrying forward this enterprise of finding integrity among our convictions (63). All this is discussed at length in chapter 7.The closest Dworkin comes to the one-big-idea version of hedgehog-ism is in the role he allocates to what he calls dignity. The central idea that organizes his ethics, his morality, and his political morality is the principle that people must take their own lives seriously and make something valuable of them. They must see the success or failure of their lives as a matter of importance, and they must accept a personal responsibility to figure out what will count as success in their lives and to create those successful lives to the extent that they can. This (rather complex) principle Dworkin calls “dignity.” It is for him the core of personal ethics, and it generates (in a way I'll discuss in a moment) the responsibilities of interpersonal morality as well.The use of the language of human dignity is provocative. Dworkin says the idea has been “debased by flabby overuse in political rhetoric” (13). Still, “it would be a shame to surrender an important idea or even a familiar name to this corruption” (204). I wish he had done more either to relate or contrast his use of “dignity” with other accounts of it in the modern literature: apart from a few remarks about Kant, the closest he comes is to cite Stephen Darwall's (1977, 36) familiar distinction between recognition respect and appraisal respect, identifying the demands of human dignity with the former (205). It would have been good if he had identified his conception of dignity as one of a number of possible conceptions of an underlying idea—maybe the concept of respect, which has been central in his work for more than thirty years. As it is, his account of dignity is developed largely under its own steam, without reference (even critical reference) to other conceptions. And really, as the argument of the book unfolds, it is the content of the principle about taking seriously the value of one's own life that does most of the work. That it is a principle called “dignity” doesn't seem to matter one way or the other.The key to the early part of Dworkin's argument is the suggestion that we cannot take seriously value in our own lives—which is the primary requirement incumbent upon us—without taking seriously the lives of others. This is supposed to integrate the demands of ethics with the demands of interpersonal morality. Dworkin relies in a familiar way “on Immanuel Kant's thesis that we cannot adequately respect our own humanity unless we respect humanity in others” (14). To have respect for oneself means respecting the lives of others too, because lack of respect for others would show that one did not take a sufficiently objective attitude to the question of respect for oneself. “Your reason for thinking it objectively important how your life goes is also a reason you have for thinking it important how anyone's life goes: you see the objective importance of your life mirrored in the objective importance of everyone else's” (260).As I said, the move is familiar, but I am not sure it works. Dworkin is building on the point that people can and must be convinced when they attribute value to their own lives or when they consider whether their lives have value that they are doing so in an objective spirit, in the sense that they do not think of this as just a matter of taste. But this is not the same as the thought that there is nothing special about my life, qua mine. I may think of the value of my own life in the spirit of an objective observer; I may ask myself whether such an observer would regard any life pursued in this way as valuable; but it is a further point to think that any life lived in such a way (or in any satisfactory way) is valuable in a way that imposes constraints on the way that I live mine. Dworkin believes that the sense of there being a gap here is explained by the other aspect of his “dignity” principle—that each person has a special responsibility for how his or her own life goes which he or she does not have for the lives of others. And he thinks this is rightly separable from the elementary estimation of the importance of each person's life. I don't deny the distinction, but I still don't think that you get to the latter idea simply by insisting on the objective aspect of the approach that one takes to one's own life.The gap is all the wider because Dworkin's sense of what we owe in respect of others' lives is really quite demanding. True, we can't and mustn't try to live their lives for them. But there are ways of failing to help others that he thinks are incompatible with estimating the objective importance of their having lives to live at all—incompatible, that is to say, with the objectivity of our basic self-respect. Now Dworkin does not really elaborate on this. He says it is a matter of interpretation: “When I can prevent a serious harm with relatively little risk or inconvenience to myself, failing to do so is less easily defended as consistent with an objective respect for human life” (276). He discusses the currency of well-being in which I must estimate the cost to me of helping in relation to the benefit that this would give them: do I do this in terms of my conception or their conception of well-being (276–77)? And he says that it may depend partly on how exactly I am confronted with the predicament of others' needs, which I guess is a matter of how large their need looms in my present consciousness and what the significance for me would be of my turning down their occurrent plea for help (277ff.). This is a large book, but there isn't a great deal of space in it to fill out all of the arguments Dworkin is making.One very striking argument that he makes, right at the end of the book, is about the relation between law and morality. Dworkin long argued that these are inseparable: you can't make legal judgments without making moral judgments. The two are entangled. But in Justice for Hedgehogs, he essays a strikingly more aggressive position: law, he says, is “a branch...of political morality” (405), and legal reasoning is a form of moral reasoning. He says we should abandon the enterprise of constructing bridges between law and morality. Law is a form of morality. Certainly, it is a complicated and uneasy form, for it depends on judgments about the moral importance of contingent events like enactment and the setting of precedents that ordinary moralizing does not concern itself with.“Nothing guarantees that our laws will be just,” Dworkin acknowledges (5). But that doesn't mean that we separate law and morality; it means we complicate the relation between law and morality. Like a system of ethics that has to deal with the moral significance of promises we wish had never been made, so too the morality of law has to come to terms—come to moral terms—with statutes we wish had never been passed and precedents we wish had not been laid down. I find this a powerful and provocative argument, relying as it does on the integration of our ideas about political obligation, legality (or the rule of law), and legal doctrine itself in a single conception.There is much more in Justice for Hedgehogs than I have been able to convey. It is a philosophical cornucopia, for besides all the work on substantive value, there are chapters on interpretation, free will, and responsibility. Every reader will be frustrated by some of Dworkin's arguments and provoked by others; yet they will find themselves gleaning insights of considerable importance and originality from still other arguments in the book. Again, that is the sort of hedgehog Dworkin was. I believe the lasting significance of this book will not be the unified hedgehog-ish vision it presents, or its conception of dignity, but rather particular facets of the integrity that Dworkin established among our values. He was really a fox after all. But when you reach into his trove for just one of the many goodies he has gathered, you will find as it comes out that it adheres to any number of other treasures that you didn't expect

Argument (complex analysis) · Democracy · Dignity · Economic Justice · Epistemology · Faith · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics

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• The Hedgehog and the Fox

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• Two Kinds of Respect

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