Justice for Hedgehogs [Hardcover]

A Dworkinian statement is usually clear, sharp, and pointedly thought-provoking. This book contains 423 pages of such statements covering a range of subjects from skepticism to morality, living the good life, interpretation, dignity, free will law, and truth. Dworkin's thesis here is that all these abstracts can be unified and grounded on the value he described as "Dignity". By conventional interpretation of the phrase "A fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing", the fox hesitates to form one single, all-encompassing value that attaches to all things on earth. The hedgehog, on the other hand, believes that it has its thumb pressed against that solitary, centrifugal nerve and the value that controls all values. It is Dworkin's thesis that a single principle (which he identifies as "dignity") unifies all moral values. He claims that the pluralism of thinkers like Isaiah Berlin cannot be sustained, let alone function because one cannot have two values diverse but equally true. Dworkin does not mask his intention to show us that he is an hedgehog, but can he assume that role without grasping and reconciling the truth in all the disparate values that philosophers, scientists, and theologians, have hitherto been unable to reconcile? If Dworkin could, and had done so, one wonders if he might not have been, like Tolstoy, a fox who thinks he is an hedgehog? How strong is his foundation based on "dignity"?

To have expressed all his views as emanating from one stock value in such a relatively short book, Dworkin might have had to omit steps in arguments which, no doubt, his critics will pursue. Indeed, Dworkin invites responses in a specially created website: www justiceforhedgehogs net (I have used a space instead of a period otherwise, for some strange reason, the website name does not appear on the review). There have already been comments and criticisms: See Michael Smith: 2009 Boston Law Review vol 90 p.509 (commenting on the draft manuscript). Nonetheless, "Justice for Hedgehogs", like most of Dworkin's books, is an elegant, charming, and provocative intellectual work.

Ronald Dworkin (b. 1931) has enjoyed a long career as a writer on legal and political philosophy. In addition to his many books, Dworkin writes for a broad public in analyzing Supreme Court decisions in the New York Review of Books. The scope of his writing has expanded over the years. In his most recent book, "Justice for Hedgehogs", Dworkin broadens his scope from legal and political philosophy to address larger philosophical questions of metaphysics, interpretation and epistemology, and ethics. It is a challenging and wonderful work.

Dworkin's title derives from a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin "The Hedgehog and the Fox" taken in its turn from the Greek poet Archilocus who said: "the fox knows many things but the hedghehog knows one big thing." Berlin's essay was largely a defense of the way of the fox and of pluralism. It shows a healthy skepticism of any claim to know the single truth. Dworkin for his part takes the side of the hedgehog. Dworkin's basic claim is for what he calls the "unity of value" and the claim that people can work to ethical truth rather than to a variety of competing claims to the truth. In many respects. this may seem an audacious claim that goes contrary to much modernistic thought. Dworkin realizes and plays upon this and develops his claims slowly and carefully. In many respects, Dworkin draws heavily on modernism and modernistic arguments, especially in his emphasis on interpretation. He gives some ancient philosophical doctrines a modernistic turn. In reading this book, as with many philosophical works, it is best to read the introductory chapter carefully and return to it together with the concluding epilogue. Doing so will bring focus to the lengthy arguments and help the reader understand Dworkin's project.

Dworkin uses the phrase "colonial metaphysics" several times and speaks of tne need finally for its abandonment (p. 418). What he means is roughly this: many people have seen ethical truths as dependent somehow on a more basic form of metaphysics. With the Enlightenment, thinkers adopted a metaphysics of naturalism and tried to explain ethics within the terms of a scientific worldview. This proved unsucessful. Prior to that, many thinkers offered a religious, theistically based explanation for ethics. In both these cases and other cases, ethical truth was deemed dependent upon some other truth. Basically, ethical truths were viewed as analogously to discovering "things" "out there" in the way a scientist studies bodies or a theologian studies God. Dworkin denies that ethics has this form of metaphysical basis in "things". That is why he claim that ethics should not be viewed as a "colony" of metaphysics and should be studied on its own terms. Dworkin makes creative use of the philosophy of David Hume who denied that ethical truths could be at all derived from what is. While many people have taken Hume's argument as leading towards skepticism, Dworkin maintains instead that it leads to the independence (non-colonial character) of ethics and that ethics is its own self-contained form of truth.

Early in the book, Dworkin tries to confront various forms of ethical skepticism and maintains, successfully or not, that the important forms of such skepticism are self-refuting. (Such arguments are regularly used in metaphysics, less commonly in ethics.) He wants to find a form of ethics not rooted in theology or scientism. He finds such a source by discussing ethics as an interpretive discipline. Interpretation and meaning play large roles in much modern thinking. What distinguishes Dworkin in his claim that truth is found in interpretation, whether of legal texts, poems, or works of art and music. People know in two ways, for Dworkin: we know the natural world scientifically and the ethical, human world through meaning. We discover truth differently, but in neither case, if it is to have meaning at all, is it "subjective". Interpretive truth differs from scientific truth in that it is found through argument and in that its concepts are interrelated. In human life, Dworkin distinguishes and then interrelates what he calls ethics and morality. People have an ethical duty to themselves that is expressed adverbiably: to live well and meaningfully with a project of the individual agent's choosling. Morality is the duty owed to others. It has a Kantian basis for Dworkin which involves expanding to others the realization of one's own dignity and right to choose one's form of life. As with all ethical concepts, ethics and morality fold together, I think, in leading the good life.

Much of Dworkin's project, for those with philosophical background, can be viewed as uniting Hume and Kant. Dworking also is heavily influenced by what he sees as the interpretive, interrelated character of Platonic and Aristotelian ethics without their metaphysical trappings (pp. 184 -188). Charles Peirce, mentioned all-too-briefly, is another thinker with a large influence on Dworkin (pp 177 -178).

As the book develops, Dworkin explains his independence thesis in the first part and his understanding of interpretation and its nature in the second part. In the third part, Dworkin develops his concept of ethics (finding purpose in one's own life) and in the fourth, his concept of morality (our duties to other people). In the final part of the book, Dworkin returns to the legal and political philosophy which had been the focus of his efforts prior to this book. The epilogue with its title "Dignity Indivisible" aptly and with a sense of urgency and passion recapitulates Dworkin's arguments and what he perceives as their importance.

The book works best in its breadth, in its fresh and challenging discussion of truth, interpretation and unity. Observations on law and politics are interthreaded throughout the book, but the final section of the book on these matters seems to me rushed and less than convincing. I do not agree with some of Dworkin's political or legal conclusions but still find much to admire and learn from in his work. On occasion, Dworkin simply refers to his earlier writings, assuming perhaps too optimistically familiarity on behalf of his readers. The book takes a strong stance against scientism and its particular reductivism. Dworking also rejects the tendency, common to critics of scientism and to people who use various forms of interpretive theory, to call for a return to God or to theology. This is an unabashedly secular book. Dworkin writes with a concern for understanding life in its shortness and mortality, faced with full knowledge of impending death. By living life with ideals and in the search for truth, Dworkin concludes. "We write a subscript to our motality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands." (p. 423)

Dworkin's book is itself the work of a lifetime of thought and commitment to a project. It is impressive in its scope, its argument, its erudition, and its love for the life of the mind and of culture. It offers a challenge to the reader at whatever stage of his or her life to rethink projects and priorites. The book deserves and will undoubtedly receive sustained study and attention.

Robin Friedman

This is the one fact known by the hedgehog: some things are morally right and some things are morally wrong, even if no one agreed with the fact or no people existed to agree with the fact. How you live your life, treat other people, and construct a political state depends on this one fact.

If this thesis sounds like cowboy justice unfit for a philosopher, think again. Dworkin starts with a summary of the whole book and his motivations in chapter 1, and he methodically spends the rest of the book defending them.

This book is a philosophical essay, but a very readable one for anyone with a small amount of background knowledge. Dworkin takes extra care not to lose anyone along the way in unclear terminology, although the book may spark an interest in more reading you didn't know you had. The 400+ pages are are clear, detailed, and accessible to anyone who's ever even heard of Rawls, Kant, or John Stuart Mill. If you haven't heard of them, you may have to make a few trips to Wikipedia or to Intro to Western Philosophy 101, but Dworkin summarizes arguments for and against anything he discusses, so extra references aren't necessary otherwise.

Bottom line- if you believe the the hedgehog, read the book. If you don't believe the hedgehog, read the book.

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