Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs ***

Ronald Dworkin is a legal scholar and philosopher. Justice for Hedgehogs is his admirable attempt to present and justify his entire worldview. He mentions justice in the title, but the book explains his positions on a full range of philosophical topics from the nature of truth and the status of ethics to living well and forming legitimate governments. I would love to write this sort of book for myself, showing how my thoughts fit together and discovering the foundational beliefs.

In brief, Dworkin believes that science and ethics/morals are non-overlapping magisteria with distinct ways of assigning truth. In the unified value-laden realm of ethics and morals, concepts are interpretive and irreducibly evaluative. Ethical propositions can be TRUE, however, and the two most fundamental are:

• "We each have a sovereign ethical responsibility to make something of value of our own lives"
• "The objective importance of your life reflects a universal importance" and dignity that you must respect in all others.

Dworkin tries to justify his more specific beliefs – which are largely stereotypical American liberal beliefs – by arguing that they follow from properly understood versions of these premises. His ultimate goal is to argue for the legitimacy, nay, necessity, of moral values in legal analysis:

Law includes not only the specific rules enacted in accordance with the community's accepted practices but also the principles that provide the best moral justification for those enacted rules. (p 402)

As much as I admire the attempt, I think Dworkin overreaches by trying to prove that his worldview is the uniquely true one. Far too much of the book makes unconvincing arguments against respectable alternative philosophies. In sections that cover topics I know well, like the fact/value dichotomy, I can see Dworkin's oversimplications or misunderstandings of the alternatives. I would also need more information to see how his view differs from Rorty's pragmatism and Quine's holism.

I think Dworkin's worldview is a viable one, not that it is the uniquely true one. A more humble presentation would have been more compelling.

Paul Theroux, The Lower River *** 1/2

I read a number of Paul Theroux's novels and travel books back in the 1990s, but lost track of him by the turn of the century. The Lower River, from 2012, is just the second of his recent books I've read (along with Blinding Light, which I didn't care for).

Like much of Theroux's best work, The Lower River takes place in a remote part of the world and has autobiographical overtones. The protagonist, Ellis Hock, send his critical formative years in the Peace Corp in Malawi. When his marriage falls apart at age 62, he decides to return to the village where he was stationed, since he remembers it as the happiest time in his life. Life there is just as he remembers it, except that it is not really. The locals have become a lot more cynical in the forty years he has been gone, and they start exploiting him right away.

The themes and narrative structure are quite good, and Theroux writes natural description well. I had two issues, though. First, Hock's character is a bit too nice and monochromatic: one of the things I used to love about Theroux was that his characters -- including himself in the travel books -- were inevitably prickly. Second, the back half of the book is repetitive as Hock's attempts to leave are repeatedly thwarted.

David Lewis, We the Navigators **** 1/2

My most substantial souvenir from our recent trip to Hawaii, We, the Navigators explores The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. In other words, it explains how South Sea islanders navigated their watery world without instruments. How does one sail 1000 miles across open ocean and arrive at a tiny atoll?

The book provides practical details about many specific techniques, such as using star compasses, reading swells, identifying land clouds, and following birds. (Flying fish always head into the current just before re-entering the water!) More impressively, it presents the conceptual worldview of the traditional navigator, which is quite different from the modern Western approach.

Lewis writes the book in a very academic style. He culls data from many sources, but the clearest and most entertaining illustrations of the techniques come from voyages he undertook himself with actual practitioners of the art.

Like Thinking in Jazz, We, the Navigators elucidates a complex and esoteric skill in a way that makes it simultaneously less mysterious and more impressive.