I was just reading Thomas Nagel's book Analytic Philosophy and Human Life (not his best book). It has in it Nagel's review of Stephen Guest's biography of Ronald Dworkin. He talks about Dworkin's reply to Berlin on this point. A brief excerpt:
...
Thirdly, the guiding value that succeeds in unifying our values is that of dignity, which in turn has two interdependent components: equality and individual responsibility. Dworkin believed that these complementary values enabled him to dissolve all the traditional tensions within moral and political theory—between morality and self-interest, between liberty and equality, between the right and the good.
This is a truly Platonic level of ambition. Plato argued for the convergence of justice and the good of the individual by identifying the virtue of justice with an ordered condition of the soul. Dworkin argued, as Guest puts it, that “the critically ideal life is the best life we could lead if we had at our disposal the material and other resources that the best theory of justice entitles us to have.” So not only those who are unjustly impoverished are denied good lives, but also those who are unjustly enriched. If a more just system of taxation would leave a wealthy person with less disposable income and wealth than he actually has in a very unequal society, then according to Dworkin his life will be less of a success, whatever he does with it, than it could be if he lived under a more egalitarian system.
Likewise, there is no conflict between the values of liberty and equality, because the equality that morality requires of a political system is equality in the resources that people need to exercise their individual responsibility for their lives—equality in the conditions of liberty. That equality is a condition of the equal value of liberty for the different individuals in the society. By making people equal in their means, we leave them free to take responsibility for the choice and pursuit of their ends. A just society respects everyone’s dignity in that sense—showing them equal concern, but also ensuring their personal responsibility for their lives.
This is undeniably a noble vision, opposed to the pluralism about values that implies that conflict among them is inevitable and that there is no social choice without loss. Isaiah Berlin was a prominent advocate of that pluralist position, and the title of Justice for Hedgehogs picks up the challenge of Berlin’s distinction between unifiers and multipliers to come down squarely on the side of unity. This also determines Dworkin’s method of interpretation, which he believed applies in every domain where questions have to be answered that go beyond the purely descriptive or scientific facts.
...
= new reply since forum marked as read
