No Cheers for Hedgehogs

Ronald Dworkin has a book forthcoming later this year, Justice for Hedgehogs, but there is already a symposium in the Boston University Law Review discussing it with a response by Dworkin. I have always been attracted to the main lines of Dworkin’s philosophy of law and repelled by his account of liberalism. Indeed, I got interested in political theory because of how much I disagreed with him. In general, I despise his liberalism because it is designed for hedgehogs. In my view, social reality is too complicated and values conflict in too many contexts to hope or expect that a theory with a few small premises could lead us to good results across a wide variety of cases, but that is exactly Dworkin’s objective. I think the notion that the state should be neutral about the good life to be simplistic. I think that the deductions of hedgehog theory are forced. I think they obscure the tragic choices inevitably made in decisionmaking. I went on a partial rant in this vein at the Colloquium on Philosophy and the Social Sciences in Prague and one of the presenters, Frank Michelman, who has read the book (and written about it in an interesting essay) said, “Steve, you are not going to like this book.”

 I have read many of the essays in the symposium. I particularly like two of them so far (in addition to Frank Michelman’s). Martha Minow and Joe Singer have a wonderful essay stressing the existence of tragic choices that are suppressed by Dworkin’s analysis and why the acknowledgement of such choices is more true and humane that that put forward by Dworkin. Robin West also has a very nice essay which opposes the neutrality about the good life idea and argues that the idea of rights as trumps can obscure the tragic choices made.  She also makes the interesting point that with all our theorizing about what legislators must not do; we have undertheorized the question of what they should be morally (and perhaps legally) obligated to do.

These essays and the other essays in the symposium are available here