It was an assumption of the ancients, and a desire of the early moderns, that there should be a deep connection between what is of value in the world and the well-lived life. That connection is simple but can be variously expressed: that a life is well lived if lived in conformity with what matters; that the pursuit of what matters is constitutive of the worthwhile life; that lives shaped and guided by value-based goals are the best kinds of lives. The trick was to establish what matters; living in conformity with it might not always be easy (weakness of will and insufficient luck, as Aristotle noted, are among the greatest barriers to doing so), but this seemed the lesser problem.
Behind this assumption was another: that values – the things that matter – form an interconnected, mutually supportive and therefore integrated whole. If this were not so then the connection between values and the worthwhile life would at least be complicated, if not compromised. Suppose there to be an unresolvable tension between two great values – say, individual liberty and social justice – such that the pursuit of one is a stumbling-block to the other. At the very least, an individual who cares about both will be condemned to live with the strain of the conflict. Isaiah Berlin famously saw this as the tragedy of the liberal condition.
There are of course always resolutions on the further reaches of the spectrum of views about political morality: for the libertarian on one wing and the totalitarian on the other, it is easy to see which value is subordinate, or not even a value. But for those who think that the moral realm is in some sense a kingdom of ends, these are not options; for them the hope is that one person’s liberty does not have to be bought at the expense of injustice to others, that fairness for all does not have to limit or obviate the legitimate choices of each.
The view that such hope is vain has been embraced with enthusiasm by some, infected by the postmodernist relish for contrarian and relativistic options. But it has also been accepted more rationally by others, or has posed itself as a peculiarly difficult obstruction to systematic accounts of values and virtues, and most particularly to the achievement of consistency in depictions of personal ethics and political morality. There is a distinguished roll-call of recent and contemporary philosophers who have taken this view, even if they sought also to argue that it is not wholly destructive of the idea of moral life: chief among them Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, Michael Stocker, David Wiggins, John Kekes, and of course Isaiah Berlin himself.
Ronald Dworkin took up cudgels against this trend in order to make the case for the unity of value in his last great book, Justice for Hedgehogs (2013). ‘The truth about living well and being good and what is wonderful is not only coherent but mutually supporting,’ he writes in it; ‘what we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest.’
Making this case required Dworkin to bring together ethics, morals, politics and law in a complex tapestry of argument that contests some of the most widely accepted contemporary views in philosophy. The cases he makes about truth and interpretation, free will, the status of moral claims, justice, law, liberty, democracy, and the mutually supportive relations that hold among them, are therefore controversial and often radical. This is all the more so because Dworkin is an applied philosopher; these topics are matters of practical importance, making a difference in legislatures and courts of law, and through them touching hundreds of millions of individual lives.
That is what gives the overall argument its urgency, for one notes that Dworkin’s principal applied aim in establishing the unity of value is the familiar and central one for him: the question of justice and political morality.
Dworkin says that the two fundamental conditions of legitimacy for any government are that it should display equal concern for each individual under its sway, while at the same time recognising the right and responsibility of all individuals to choose how to make good lives for themselves. These principles constrain acceptable theories about how governments should distribute opportunities and resources among the governed. In particular they rule out theories that promote the virtues of unbridled markets as well as those, at the other extreme, that urge equalisation of resources independently of individual efforts and talents. So the demand is for a way to effect just distributions that respect both principles. This is what Dworkin seeks to do in the book’s closing sections. But the journey to that goal involves confronting many currently entrenched views entailing the disunity of value; the meat of the book is a mighty battle against these.
One such entrenched view is that there will inevitably be a conflict between the justice thus sought, and liberty. Dworkin offers a view that rules such conflict out. He starts by distinguishing freedom from liberty, the former being what one can do without restraint from government, the latter being that part of freedom which a government would do wrong to forbid. He does not think that there is a general right to freedom, but instead a set of rights – to ethical autonomy, free expression, ownership of property and due legal process – which together flow from the right to equal concern owed to them by government (hence due process and ownership) and from the right and responsibility to find their own way to a good life (hence free expression and autonomy). This means that the concepts of liberty and equality are fully integrated; there is no way to decide what liberty requires without having a view about which way of distributing resources and opportunities will display equal concern for each person.
The alleged threat of conflict remains, however, between these two values, just reconciled, and democracy. Here the idea is that a majority might vote to pass laws diminishing or abrogating liberty and the just distribution it requires. Having a right to participate in making such decisions therefore offers the prospect of conflict. Dworkin says that the answer is to discriminate more finely among senses of ‘democracy’. If instead of resting content with a majoritarian or statistical definition of democracy one argues for a partnership conception of it – that is, one having it that each individual is an equal partner in the process, thus having an equal stake in the outcome of decisions, not just an equal vote in arriving at them – then one sees that democracy in fact requires liberty and justice in just the senses given.
A standard line in discussions about political theory is that we face a perennial threat of conflict between justice and law. The idea is that there are no guarantees that laws will be just, and when they are not, those who apply the laws will accordingly be required by them to perpetrate injustices. Dworkin’s response is to argue for a shift in perspective on the nature of law to see it as a branch of morality, and hence incapable of conflicting with it. This requires a twofold adjustment of viewpoint: there has to be an emphasis on ideas of fair governance as well as just outcomes, what Dworkin calls ‘procedural justice’, and one has to see the claim that law is part of morality as locating it on a flow-chart of conceptions in which the most general one, ethics (the living of a good life), embraces morality (how one treats others), which in turn embraces politics; and law, in its turn again, is embraced by political morality.
Dworkin acknowledged that this approach might seem to gain him his victory too easily – arriving at the unity of values by mere redefinition of terms, thus conjuring conflict away. But each step of the argument is vigorously and fully argued in successive chapters of the book; the test he set himself – that ‘what we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest’ – is applied throughout. Indeed his insistence on a coherence criterion for the sustainability of these claims – the requirement that they are fully interlocking and mutually supportive – is fundamental to his case. How else, he asks, could our conceptions of political values be conclusively persuasive unless they form an integrated whole? En route there are therefore arguments about the notions (truth, free will, the nature of moral claims) which are vital components of the structure that brings them together and holds them there.
Obviously enough, a crucial one is truth. If an argument is to be successfully made that such-and-such a way of thinking about a given key concept – liberty, say, or equality – is the right one, then there has to be a test of rightness, and before that a community of understanding of the concept itself. Agreements and disagreements over concepts are genuine when the parties all share the same understanding of them. Lots of cases are easy to settle, for example a dispute over how many apples are in the basket, because we agree on what counts as an appropriate test. But we also share some concepts in a different way, on the basis of what Dworkin calls ‘interpretation’. Here he makes a move reminiscent of Wittgenstein. There can be a community of understanding about such concepts because of the way they figure in our shared experience and form of life, allowing us to recognise them as concepts describing values even if we disagree about the values themselves. Such a disagreement would not merely be a verbal one of the sort that a dictionary could settle, or one concerning matters of fact. It would be a disagreement that requires us to invoke other values as justifying our view about the value in question – which itself shows that values are inseparably interconnected.
Because of the significance of the concept of interpretation for Dworkin’s account, he devotes two chapters to it, one on its general use across a wide range of subject matters including literature, history, law, sociology and more, and one more specifically on conceptual interpretation, bearing directly on moral reasoning. In the first Dworkin offers a general theory of interpretation which is value-based, arguing that any interpreter, whether of a law or a literary text, an historical occurrence or a political act, has ‘critical responsibilities’ which, when best lived up to, constitute the best interpretation of the law or text in question. Despite all the puzzles that the idea of interpretation invites, not least that in offering one we sometimes ‘feel’ that our own is right (or true) even when we cannot explain why in opposition to someone else’s contrary interpretation, nevertheless ‘the distinctive truth-seeking and argumentative phenomenology of interpretation survives. Interpretation would be a radically different intellectual activity if interpreters did not characteristically claim truth and assume disagreement rather than only difference.’
This invites the ‘daunting’ task of explaining what makes interpretative judgements true, if they are true. Here is where Dworkin’s ‘value theory’ bites. We interpret as we do because there is a practice or tradition of interpretation that we can join, and this practice aims at truth. In offering interpretations we both intend, and are understood as intending, to say something true. We do not regard our interpretative activities as pointless endeavours; we seek to achieve something by them, often important things. We assume that something of value is served by interpreting, and we accept our responsibility to promote that value. ‘Interpretation is therefore interpretative, just as morality is moral, all the way down.’
It is a corollary of this that Dworkin was an objectivist about value: there really are wrong acts and unjust institutions, and cases can be made for saying so. In this he goes against the majority trend of thinking about value in contemporary debate, and not just as part of the academic game: ‘We cannot defend a theory of justice without also defending, as part of the same enterprise, a theory of moral objectivity. It is irresponsible to try to do without such a theory.’
One of several key moments in furtherance of this argument is reached in Dworkin’s chapter on conceptual interpretation. Having distinguished interpretative concepts from others in a taxonomy of concepts, and insisting again that moral concepts are interpretative concepts, he adds, ‘That claim has great significance for moral and political philosophy. It offers to explain, for example, why the popular idea is mistaken that philosophers can provide an “analysis” of justice or liberty or morality or courage or law that is neutral about the substantive value or importance of those ideals.’ There can be no such neutral analyses, for anything said about any of these ideals is itself in the end an endorsement or rejection of them. In particular application to morality, the claim is that there are no meta-ethical statements, where ‘meta-ethics’ is second-order philosophical reflection on the nature and status of moral claims. Rather, there are only normative first-order ones; a putative meta-ethical statement such as ‘there are no objective moral truths’ is, Dworkin argues, itself a normative ethical statement.
One big thing this means is that debates about where value comes from, and whether we should be realist or anti-realist, constructivist or minimalist about them (to employ the terms of vigorous recent debates about their metaphysical status), are, says Dworkin, beside the point, for value is independent. There is no question of having to match value judgements to moral entities of some kind existing ‘out there’ as the truth-makers or breakers of what we say. Such judgements are true, when true, because of the case that can be made on behalf of them. All talk of values is value-talk; there is no extra level of talk about values – their status, their analysis – which is not itself value-laden, and therefore in fact just value-talk.
Another way of putting the point is to say that any theory of such values as justice or liberty is moral ‘all the way down’. And that means that moral responsibility is a crucial matter. We might not be able to demand agreement from our fellows in society, but we can demand that they be responsible in their reasoning and acting, taking seriously their interpretations of fundamental moral concepts and placing them in the overall scheme of values which accommodates and supports them. But the idea of responsibility as a virtue, to which Dworkin devotes a chapter, in turn requires that we conceive of ourselves as beings possessed of free will; and here Dworkin offers important arguments for a ‘compatibilist’ view to the effect that the idea of ourselves as genuinely responsible agents is consistent with any plausible assumption we can make about what causes our decisions and what follows from them. His starting point for the case is ethical, set in the phenomenology of agency – the fact that no one can literally believe ‘pessimistic incompatibilism’, the view that because ‘all behaviour is determined by past events [it is] never appropriate to attribute judgemental responsibility to anyone’. By itself, of course, this phenomenological point is not an argument for what matters to Dworkin, namely ‘judgemental responsibility’, but it reminds us of the capacities that are relevant to its expression – being able to form true beliefs and to make decisions consistent with one’s normative personality. The immediate importance of these capacities is that no one can live well – the ethical goal – unless they often enough make the right decisions based on true beliefs. And the question, ‘How should one live?’ is the central and fundamental question.
Dworkin also presents a sustained argument for the view that we all have an overriding responsibility to create something of value in our lives, and further argues that our responsibilities to others follow from this responsibility to ourselves. The value we seek to promote in both cases is ‘adverbial value’ – it arises from how we live, from the manner of our living. Dignity and self-respect, taking one’s own life seriously, asserting the right and accepting the responsibility to make ethical decisions for ourselves: this is the stuff of the good life, and it implies an attitude of respect for others – hence, the ethical promotes the moral – because in the fulfilment of our own humanity we recognise and respond to the humanity of others. There are many familiar but important questions in the offing here which, in a succession of chapters, Dworkin considers, variously regarding whom we should aid and when, why we should not harm them, what our obligations to them are and whether obligations are graduated by degrees of membership in various communities. This in turn raises the question of justice, which is where the book ends, completing the demonstration that politics is part of ethics, and that the values which constitute the overarching network of ethics form ipso facto a unitary and integrated system.
Dworkin’s rejection of meta-ethics is tied to a particular reading of Hume’s insistence that value cannot be derived from fact, a reading which denies that this insistence amounts to scepticism about morality. In saying that all moral judgements and claims are both normative and truth-valued, and that their truth, when true, is established by the case that can be made for them, Dworkin is, as we see, firmly repudiating views about the nature of moral judgements premised on their not being literally true or false. Such views analyse moral judgements as exhortations to behave in certain ways, or as expressions of attitudes or preferences; on such views assertions like ‘that is good’ really mean ‘behave like that!’ or ‘I like that!’ Now, it would be a feeble attempt at a counter to Dworkin to say that rejecting meta-ethics is itself a meta-ethical position, given that he has a better theory about first-order moral claims, namely, that they are true or false and that their truth-values are established by argument. But it is worth pointing out that one can agree with him on this while rejecting the Humean fact-value distinction. There is an attractive alternative to it which says that there are certain facts about sentient creatures, and most obviously human beings, that are value-soaked right through, and whose truth is what makes certain moral assertions true. For example, the capacity of sentient beings for suffering and pleasure, and their preference in general for the latter over the former, places an immediate constraint on the choices of an agent aware of this fact and conscious of the conformity of his own preferences with it. To charge someone with insensitivity, cruelty, malice, sadism and the like, if he harms other sentient creatures despite knowing that, like himself, they would prefer not to be harmed, rests squarely on appeal to these very facts. This has seemed so obvious to many moralists from Epicurus onwards that it is rather Hume and G. E. Moore who seem to hold the queer view, in opposing the objectivity of morality and describing, in Moore’s case, the natural view as a fallacy (indeed, ‘the naturalistic fallacy’). Dworkin’s argument that morality is objective and its judgements evaluable for truth does not depend on prior acceptance of the Hume argument, and might indeed be strengthened by the opposite view. His acceptance of the fact–value divide might in part be motivated by the desire to treat the making of value judgements as a self-consistent and independent exercise not vulnerable to ‘meta’ debates about their status and whether or not they assume something other than the practice itself of making them, as if appeal to naturalistic facts amounted to a concession that for value-judgements to make sense and do any work they require a realm of truth-makers and breakers. But if, as suggested, the facts are value-soaked, then the independence of the value realm is assured: that is why there is nothing else, outside them, that a meta-theory can insist must be invoked.
But the fact–value distinction plays another role in Dworkin’s account. If there is one discussion in a book so internally connected and systematic that can be lifted out for separate inspection, it is the case he makes for a compatibilist view of judgemental responsibility. The free will–determinism debate is so trodden over and riddled with efforts at escape-clause distinctions that, for the most part, it has become impossible to explore without having to heave a mountain of surrounding discussion around first. Its sheer difficulty is well illustrated by Thomas Nagel’s confession that the idea of an uncaused cause, which is what a human will would be if agent causation existed, is both unintelligible and irresistible.
Dworkin takes a fresh tack into the problem from his starting point in the ethical demand for judgemental responsibility and the everyday experience – the ‘ordinary economy’ – of exercising it. ‘Deliberate behaviour has an internal life,’ he reminds us; ‘there is a way it feels deliberately to act. We intend to do something, and we do it. There is a moment of final decision, the moment when the die is cast, the moment when the decision to act merges with the action decided on. That internal sense of deliberate action marks the distinction, essential to our ethical and moral experience, between acting and being acted upon: between pushing and being pushed.’ This is right. The phenomenology of freedom, even granting the pressures, expectations and obligations that constrain us when we choose and act, is sharply different from the phenomenology of coercion, of ‘being made to act against our will’. There is an entire palette of cases where we straightforwardly recognise the difference: hypnosis, mind control by drugs and mental illness are examples.
The question becomes one of control, understanding different concepts of which illuminates the principles connecting the causes of an agent’s decisions to his responsibility for them. One, which Dworkin calls the ‘causal’ sense of control, makes judgemental responsibility turn on the originating causes of a decision, while the other, ‘capacity’ control, is what an agent feels when he exercises a capacity to face a decision and make it without someone or something else doing it through or for him. The first embodies a third-party perspective, the second a first-person perspective. They each imply different principles as underwriters of responsibility, and they contradict each other. Dworkin’s way of choosing between them is to argue that the capacity control principle makes better sense of the rest of ethical experience and opinion, whereas the causal principle is an ‘interpretative orphan: we can find or construct no good reason why it should be part of our ethics’.
Capacity control, on the other hand, fits into an integrated picture of the value our lives have to ourselves and in themselves, and relates better to the fact that the character of our decisions is part of their value, which is not just a matter of their origins. But the ‘unfolding drama of self-conscious life’ requires what might be described as ownership of its essential elements, those constitutive and life-directing decisions which a proper account of character and biography would not be able to ignore if it were well given. This last is not quite how Dworkin puts it, but in line with his idea of interpretation as a process which, responsibly done, gives right answers or best outcomes or truth, the interpretation of a life would most responsibly focus on the sober self-attribution of responsibility for those decisions which made the life what it was.
This argument is a very important one. Proponents of versions of compatibilism closer to the causal control model, and certainly proponents of the hardest determinism, will have to ask again about the plausibility of any view that relegates to a massive and systematic error theory the salience of capacity control in our ethical autobiographies, and what it entails and is required by in our interpretation of human life – even more, of well-lived life, if the notion retains a purchase without the integrated view of values in which genuine responsibility plays a central part.
Dworkin offers a one-system picture that requires us to see that political morality flows from personal morality and that personal morality in turn flows from ethics. The view is controversial, and seems to imply that ‘a community’s law is always what it should be’. But that is not what Dworkin meant; what he meant is the family of differences that would be made by having law studied in philosophy and politics departments as well as in law schools, making a difference to each of the disciplines in question – and to the nature of their application in the real world.