Working on the Inside : Ronald Dworkin’s Moral Philosophy
In my 2009 book Moral Realism as a Moral Doctrine, I argued that morality is objective in several distinct though overlapping senses, and I further maintained that questions about the objectivity of morality are substantive moral questions (albeit usually at high levels of abstraction). In the course of that book, I made several laudatory references to Ronald Dworkin's well-known 1996 article ‘Objectivity and Truth' as well as to some of his other writings. In regard to the two main themes of my book that have just been mentioned, I took myself to be firmly allied with Dworkin. Though Moral Realism as a Moral Doctrine adverts only occasionally to his work, it makes clear my esteem for his reconception of meta-ethics as a branch of ethics.At a few other junctures in my 2009 volume, however, I criticized Dworkin. My criticisms were focused not on his legal philosophy ─ with which I have sustainedly taken issue elsewhere ─ but instead on some of his ethical positions. One such position to which I took exception is his value-monism. That is, I took exception to his opting for the hedgehog side of the ancient hedgehog/fox dichotomy that was made famous in modern times by Isaiah Berlin. Dworkin's allegiance to the former side of that dichotomy is starkly proclaimed by the title of his sprawlingly ambitious recent book Justice for Hedgehogs. In what follows, I will leave aside many sections of that impressive tome in order to concentrate on the main portion that deals with meta-ethics and on one portion that deals with the putative unity of value. Given that I am almost entirely in agreement with the former portion and largely in disagreement with the latter, this brief review will naturally impugn Dworkin's assumption that his anti-Archimedeanism and his value-monism are integrally connected