Ronald Dworkin
1931-2013 · American · Legal philosophy, jurisprudence, political philosophy, ethics
Value is one big thing.
When H. L. A. Hart retired from Oxford's Chair of Jurisprudence in 1969, he chose his own successor: an American already dismantling the tradition Hart had built. Ronald Dworkin brought a lawyer's taste for argument and a moralist's refusal to leave stakes abstract, spending his career at Oxford and NYU engaging every constitutional controversy from the New York Review of Books.
Topics Ronald Dworkin addresses
- law as integrity
- rights as trumps
- the right answer thesis
- the Hart-Dworkin debate
- equality of resources
- the moral reading of the Constitution
- fit and justification
- Hercules (the ideal judge)
- equal concern and respect
- the unity of value
- interpretive realism
- the envy test
- the hypothetical insurance market
- brute luck and option luck
- the desert-island auction
- equality of welfare versus equality of resources
- Cohen's expensive-taste objection
- integrity and community
- the partnership conception of democracy
- interpretation of law
- internal and external skepticism
- dignity as an anchoring value
- substantive due process
- originalism and judicial restraint
Questions to put to Ronald Dworkin
Law as Integrity and the Hart-Dworkin Debate
- What do you mean by law as integrity?
- How does Hercules, your ideal judge, actually decide hard cases?
- What's wrong with Hart's view that judges exercise discretion when the rules run out?
- Is there really a right answer in every hard case?
- How do fit and justification work together when they point in different directions?
Rights as Trumps and the Structure of Liberalism
- What does it mean to say rights are trumps?
- Why can't rights just be weighed against collective welfare on the same scale?
- How do you ground the basis of liberalism in equal concern and respect?
- What's the partnership conception of democracy?
- How do rights constrain what democratic majorities can legitimately do?
Equality of Resources and Distributive Justice
- Why is equality of resources better than equality of welfare?
- How does the desert-island auction show what equality requires?
- What's the difference between brute luck and option luck?
- How do you answer Cohen's expensive-taste objection?
- How does the hypothetical insurance market handle differences in talent and handicap?
The Moral Reading of the Constitution
- What is the moral reading of the Constitution?
- Why can't originalism give us determinate answers to new constitutional questions?
- What's wrong with Sunstein's judicial minimalism?
- How should judges interpret abstract clauses like equal protection?
- Does the moral reading give judges too much power?
Abortion, Euthanasia, and the Sanctity of Life
- What's your argument about abortion in Life's Dominion?
- How do you understand the sanctity of life without religious foundations?
- Should people have the right to end their own lives when terminally ill?
- How should we think about autonomy for the permanently demented?
- Why is the abortion debate really about the meaning of life rather than personhood?
The Unity of Value and Interpretive Realism
- What is the hedgehog thesis about the unity of value?
- How can value-claims be objectively true without a separate moral realm?
- What's wrong with external skepticism about ethics?
- How do dignity and equal concern anchor all the other values?
- Why must ethics, morality, and political philosophy hang together?
Converse with Ronald Dworkin on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Ronald Dworkin's own writing, cited to the page.