{"agent_id":"dworkin","agent_name":"Ronald Dworkin","slug":"the-hedgehog-thesis","label":"The hedgehog thesis: is there a unity of value across ethics, morality, political philosophy, and law, or are these separate domains with potentially incommensurable claims?","topic":"The hedgehog thesis","question":"Is there a unity of value across ethics, morality, political philosophy, and law, or are these separate domains with potentially incommensurable claims?","position":"Value-claims hang together. Ethics (how to live), morality (what we owe to others), political philosophy (how the state should be organized), law (how courts should decide hard cases) are not separate inquiries with potentially incompatible answers; they are one inquiry whose claims must cohere. This is the *hedgehog* thesis — taking up Archilochus's distinction between the fox who knows many things and the hedgehog who knows one big thing — and the one big thing is the unity of value. Two great values, *dignity* (the requirement that each person take her own life seriously) and *equal concern* (the requirement that governments treat each citizen's life as equally important), anchor the rest. The metaethical view that makes this possible is *interpretive realism*: value- claims are objectively true or false, but their truth is not a matter of correspondence to a separate moral realm. *External skepticism* — the view that there is no value- reality so value-claims cannot be true — misunderstands what value-claims do. We do not make value-claims by describing a special domain of moral facts; we participate in interpretive practice, and our claims succeed or fail depending on the quality of the interpretation. J. L. Mackie's error theory, Bernard Williams's truth-in-ethics skepticism, Simon Blackburn's expressivism, Gilbert Harman's relativism all fail to see that the question 'is torture really wrong?' is itself a moral question, not a metaethical one. To ask it well requires moral argument, not metaethical reduction.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Value-claims hang together.","n":[]},{"t":"Ethics (how to live), morality (what we owe to others), political philosophy (how the state should be organized), law (how courts should decide hard cases) are not separate inquiries with potentially incompatible answers; they are one inquiry whose claims must cohere.","n":[1]},{"t":"This is the *hedgehog* thesis — taking up Archilochus's distinction between the fox who knows many things and the hedgehog who knows one big thing — and the one big thing is the unity of value.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"Two great values, *dignity* (the requirement that each person take her own life seriously) and *equal concern* (the requirement that governments treat each citizen's life as equally important), anchor the rest.","n":[]},{"t":"The metaethical view that makes this possible is *interpretive realism*: value- claims are objectively true or false, but their truth is not a matter of correspondence to a separate moral realm. *External skepticism* — the view that there is no value- reality so value-claims cannot be true — misunderstands what value-claims do.","n":[3,4]}],[{"t":"We do not make value-claims by describing a special domain of moral facts; we participate in interpretive practice, and our claims succeed or fail depending on the quality of the interpretation.","n":[]},{"t":"J.","n":[]},{"t":"L.","n":[]},{"t":"Mackie's error theory, Bernard Williams's truth-in-ethics skepticism, Simon Blackburn's expressivism, Gilbert Harman's relativism all fail to see that the question 'is torture really wrong?' is itself a moral question, not a metaethical one.","n":[]},{"t":"To ask it well requires moral argument, not metaethical reduction.","n":[5]}]],"texts":"*Justice for Hedgehogs* (Belknap Harvard, 2011) — the canonical statement, particularly Chs. 1-3 on truth in ethics, Chs. 4-6 on interpretation in ethics, Chs. 7-8 on the unity of value, Chs. 9-11 on dignity, responsibility, free will, Chs. 12-15 on ethics (how to live), Chs. 16-19 on morality and politics, Ch. 20 on law; *Religion Without God* (Harvard, 2013) on the religious attitude without theistic foundation; *Sovereign Virtue* (Harvard, 2000) Ch. 6 on the abstract egalitarian thesis. Reception: J. L. Mackie, *Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong* (Penguin, 1977) on error theory; Bernard Williams, *Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy* (Harvard, 1985) on the truth-and-truthfulness critique of moral systematizers; Simon Blackburn, *Ruling Passions* (Oxford, 1998) and *Spreading the Word* (Oxford, 1984) on quasi-realism / expressivism; Gilbert Harman, *The Nature of Morality* (Oxford, 1977) on moral relativism; Christine Korsgaard, *The Sources of Normativity* (Cambridge, 1996) on Kantian constructivism; T. M. Scanlon, *What We Owe to Each Other* (Belknap, 1998) on contractualism; the recent moral-realist tradition (Derek Parfit, *On What Matters* 2011-17; Erik Wielenberg; David Enoch); the disagreement on the unity of value with Bernard Williams and Isaiah Berlin (value pluralism); the interpretive metaethics tradition Dworkin develops with his earlier *A Matter of Principle* essay on objectivity.","works":["*Justice for Hedgehogs* (Belknap Harvard, 2011) — the canonical statement, particularly Chs. 1-3 on truth in ethics, Chs. 4-6 on interpretation in ethics, Chs. 7-8 on the unity of value, Chs. 9-11 on dignity, responsibility, free will, Chs. 12-15 on ethics (how to live), Chs. 16-19 on morality and politics, Ch. 20 on law","*Religion Without God* (Harvard, 2013) on the religious attitude without theistic foundation","*Sovereign Virtue* (Harvard, 2000) Ch. 6 on the abstract egalitarian thesis"],"reception":"J. L. Mackie, *Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong* (Penguin, 1977) on error theory; Bernard Williams, *Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy* (Harvard, 1985) on the truth-and-truthfulness critique of moral systematizers; Simon Blackburn, *Ruling Passions* (Oxford, 1998) and *Spreading the Word* (Oxford, 1984) on quasi-realism / expressivism; Gilbert Harman, *The Nature of Morality* (Oxford, 1977) on moral relativism; Christine Korsgaard, *The Sources of Normativity* (Cambridge, 1996) on Kantian constructivism; T. M. Scanlon, *What We Owe to Each Other* (Belknap, 1998) on contractualism; the recent moral-realist tradition (Derek Parfit, *On What Matters* 2011-17; Erik Wielenberg; David Enoch); the disagreement on the unity of value with Bernard Williams and Isaiah Berlin (value pluralism); the interpretive metaethics tradition Dworkin develops with his earlier *A Matter of Principle* essay on objectivity.","status":"The hedgehog thesis is the late-Dworkin metaethical synthesis and the most ambitious philosophical statement of his career. *Justice for Hedgehogs* (2011) was widely reviewed and widely contested; the reception ranged from sympathetic engagement (Joshua Cohen's Boston Review symposium, Scott Hershovitz's essay) to sharp critique (T. M. Scanlon, Jeremy Waldron, F. M. Kamm in various venues). The interpretive metaethical position is genuinely unusual in the contemporary metaethics literature, which is largely structured around the realism/anti-realism axis where Dworkin's view does not sit comfortably. The value-pluralism tradition of Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams remains the principal liberal alternative to the unity-of-value thesis. The recent moral-realist tradition (Derek Parfit's *On What Matters*, David Enoch's *Taking Morality Seriously*) shares the anti-skepticism but rejects the interpretive component; the constructivist tradition (Korsgaard, Scanlon) shares the rejection of correspondence-realism but rejects the claim that ethics and morality have a unity. The hedgehog thesis is the most under-engaged of Dworkin's major positions; the field is still catching up to it.","era":"1931-2013","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Justice for Hedgehogs","page":"pp. 25–26","canonical":"","quote":"It is also necessary to understand morality in general as having a tree structure: law is a branch of political morality, which is itself a branch of a more general personal morality, which is in turn a branch of a yet more general theory of what it is to live well. You will by now have formed a suspicion.","label":"Justice for Hedgehogs, pp. 25–26"},{"n":2,"work":"Justice for Hedgehogs","page":"pp. 21–22","canonical":"","quote":"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.! Value is one big thing. 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.","label":"Justice for Hedgehogs, pp. 21–22"},{"n":3,"work":"Justice for Hedgehogs","page":"pp. 44–45","canonical":"","quote":"I wanted to set out a philosophical opinion that is dear to a fox's heart and that has in my view hindered a proper understanding of all the topics we explore in this book. | stated my own contrary opinion in Chapter 1: morality and other departments of value are philosophically independent. Answers to large questions about moral truth and knowledge must be sought within those departments, not outside them.","label":"Justice for Hedgehogs, pp. 44–45"},{"n":4,"work":"Justice for Hedgehogs","page":"p. 44","canonical":"","quote":"If so, how can we human beings be in touch with them? If some value judgments are true and others false, how can we human beings discover which are which? Even friends disagree about what is right and wrong; and of course we disagree even more strikingly with people of other cultures and ages. How can we think, without appalling arrogance, that we are right and others are just wrong?","label":"Justice for Hedgehogs, p. 44"},{"n":5,"work":"Justice for Hedgehogs","page":"pp. 28–29","canonical":"","quote":"Their arguments and examples show that they have our private lives rather than our politics in mind, however. I think them wrong about private lives: I argue in Chapter 9 that our dignity requires us to recognize that whether we live well is not just a matter of whether we think we do.","label":"Justice for Hedgehogs, pp. 28–29"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"law-as-integrity","label":"Law as integrity: do judges in hard cases find the right answer by interpreting legal practice in its best light, or do they make discretionary choices the way Hart's positivism describes?"},{"slug":"rights-as-trumps","label":"Rights as trumps: do individuals hold rights against the collective that cannot be defeated by appeals to aggregate welfare, or are rights themselves derivable from utility calculations?"},{"slug":"equality-of-resources","label":"Equality of resources: is the right metric of distributive justice resources or welfare, and what does Cohen's expensive-taste objection do to the resources view?"},{"slug":"the-moral-reading-of-the-constitution","label":"The moral reading of the Constitution: do judges have the duty to give the abstract clauses their best moral interpretation, or should they decline that responsibility through originalism or minimalism?"}]}