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.