One of the great legal scholars Ronald Dworkin talks about the importance of having a good life.In his book Justice for Hedgehogs he says that one absolute value can be applied and that is build on dignity and self-respect.
He acknowledges the plurality of views and different interpretations and perceptions of reality.Ronald Dworkin is wondering about what his friend Alfred Brendel does when he plays the piano. “Why does he play that way? When he plays a great sonata, for example, he must think his interpretation is better than other interpretations or he wouldn’t play it that way, mustn’t he?”
He continues ”Why does he think what he’s playing is better than other interpretations? He must think it’s better and the question is why. It’s not because what he plays is more beautiful than what he might otherwise play. Because if he was aiming at beauty, he could depart from what the composer had written. But he is faithful to the composition. And yet, he’s not just playing the composer’s music, he’s interpreting it.”
Dworkin writes about TS Eliot in his new book, Justice for Hedgehogs. Eliot said that poets cannot write poetry except as part of a tradition that they interpret and thereby retrospectively shape.
Dworkin’s book insists that historians, artists, lawyers, critics and philosophers are all engaged in interpretation. Every time you make a moral or political judgment about, say, gay marriages, you’re making an interpretation.
But here’s the twist that makes his book controversial. Dworkin insists many interpretations are true or false. Yes, it would be daft to say that when Alfred Brendel plays the andantino from Schubert’s Sonata in A, he has found the one and only true interpretation; right to say that he aims at interpreting it better than anyone else. But the judge who interprets a past law not only aims at interpreting it correctly, but their judgment is either true or false. Thus, at least, argues Dworkin.
“It might sound fashionable to say that there’s no right answer to legal questions. But if you say there’s no right answer in interpreting a law and you’re talking about justice, you’re not really getting involved in the issues that matter. Most intellectuals thought effectively that moral or legal judgments were just emotional expressions with no basis in cognition. Freddie Ayer argued that moral judgments are just grunts of approval or disapproval.”
Two things made the Grunt Thesis plausible. God and science. God, argues Dworkin, gave us moral laws whose truth was guaranteed by Him. But the rise of science led, Dworkin argues, to scepticism about God’s existence and thus a doubt that He could make our values true or false. The methods of science too undermined convictions that there are objective values. “The idea is that we are not entitled to think our moral convictions true unless they are required by pure reason or produced by something in the world.” In the book, Dworkin calls this “the Gibraltar of all mental blocks”. We must, he argues, get over it. And yet this Gibraltar rules the waves of philosophy: a recent issue of Philosophy Now was themed around the death of morality. If moral judgments can’t be true, do we need them at all?
textbooks made relativism and scepticism about morality seem natural. It was called Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong by JL Mackie and began: “There are no objective values.” It suggested that the fact that values conflict (I support gay marriages, while you – you monster – think they’re a disgrace) indicates they can’t be true.
Dworkin, who used to argue these points at University College, Oxford, with Mackie in the late 70s, says: “My reply to John then and now is that his scepticism is self-defeating. When Mackie says: ‘All moral propositions are false’, that’s a moral proposition, which is false if his proposition ‘All moral propositions are false’ is true, which it isn’t.” A-ha, a version of the Cretan liar paradox that Doctor Who used to make a clever robot short-circuit and explode. Sadly, Mackie died in 1981 so isn’t around to retort.
But if objective moral values aren’t in the world, where are they hiding? In the book, Dworkin finally tells us when we are justified in thinking any value judgment true, namely: “When we are justified in thinking that our arguments for holding it true are adequate arguments.” Isn’t that circular? Yes, but Dworkin argues it’s good circular, not bad circular.
. But why, you’ll be wondering, is the book called Justice for Hedgehogs? The title refers to a distinction political philosopher Isaiah Berlin made between hedgehogs and foxes, based on an ancient Greek parable. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing. Dworkin is a hedgehog. “The hedgehog is an anti-pluralist image. Pluralism was Isaiah Berlin’s extremely popular thought that there are truths but they conflict. I think it’s wrong. Truths don’t conflict in the domain of value any more than in science.”
This isn’t the first time Dworkin has written about cute wildlife. He once wrote a paper called Some Pink Zebras, asking whether something we can imagine but that does not exist can be as real as something that does exist. Justice for Hedgehogs has similar how-many-angels-can-dance on-a-pinheadpassages, but it’s grander in vision.
He builds up a comprehensive system of value – embracing democracy, justice, political obligation, morality, liberty, equality – from his notions of dignity and self-respect. Again, Dworkin isn’t part of the zeitgeist. “Almost all moral philosophy nowadays is steeped in self-abnegation. Mine starts from self-assertion, which was popular with the Greeks like Aristotle and Plato but not now. Now morality is perceived as being about self-sacrifice. I try to show how that’s wrong.”
Why is self-assertion important? “We have a responsibility to live well. Our challenge is to act as if we respect ourselves. Enjoying ourselves is not enough.” But doesn’t self-assertion clash with our moral duties to others? “No. The first challenge is to live well – that is ethics – and then to see how that connects with what we owe other people – which is morality. The connection is twofold. One is respect for the importance of other people’s lives. And the other is equal concern for their lives.”
Imagine you’re in a lifeboat and you have to decide which of two children is to go overboard to their deaths. If you’re a utilitarian – who believes what’s important morally is maximising the happiness of the greatest number – you wouldn’t mind if it was your child or another’s who dies. Dworkin’s system holds that you’re justified in saving your child. Why? “Because it’s my child! Because they’re part of what it means for my life to be lived well. They’re part of my life, for which I take responsibility.” His twin children Anthony and Jennifer, let’s hope, have always found this part of their dad’s philosophy reassuring.
“Such favouritism can’t work at a political level: you can’t give someone tax breaks because he’s your son. But at the moral level it does: you can save someone because they’re your child, while at the same time respecting other people’s lives. Each person must take his own life seriously: he must accept that it is a matter of importance that his life be a successful performance rather than a wasted opportunity. I’m talking about dignity. It’s a term overused by politicians, but any moral theory worth its salt needs to proceed from it.”
This focus on dignity gives his ethical views a special flavour. In earlier books he’s argued that a child born with terrible disabilities, or someone condemned to a persistent vegetative state may be better terminated: a life without dignity is not worth living. Here he writes about abortion with the notion of dignity in mind. He believes that “in many circumstances abortion is an act of self-contempt”: “A woman betrays her own dignity when she aborts for frivolous reasons: to avoid rescheduling a holiday, for instance. I would reach a different ethical judgment in other cases: when a teenage girl’s prospects for a decent life would be ruined if she became a single mother, for example. But whether the judgment is right or wrong in any particular case, it remains an ethical, not a moral, judgment. It must be left to women, as their dignity demands each to take responsibility for her own ethical convictions.” What about the foetus? “Because an early foetus has no interests of its own, any more than a flower does, a foetus cannot be supposed to have rights protecting its interests.”
That concern with the dignity we owe others was borrowed by Dworkin from Immanuel Kant: the idea is you cannot respect yourself unless you treat other people objectively well. “That does not happen in the US.”
At the end of the book Dworkin writes: “Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.”
Then he says. “I’ve tried to be responsible for my decisions and to make an authentic life. When I was a Wall Street lawyer, I realised I didn’t want that life. So I went and did what I found most fulfilling, thinking about, arguing for the things that are hard, important and rewarding. I’ve tried to do it well. I can’t say if I’ve succeeded.”
