Justice for Hedgehogs

The Abandonment Of Colonial Metaphysics

Ronald Dworkin (1931) -- 2013 enjoyed a long career as a writer on legal and political philosophy. In addition to his many books, Dworkin wrote for a broad public in analyzing Supreme Court decisions in the "New York Review of Books". The scope of his writing expanded over the years. In "Justice for Hedgehogs" (2011), Dworkin broadened 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 hedgehog 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 the 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 unsuccessful. 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 adverbially: to live well and meaningfully with a project of the individual agent's choosing. 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. Dworkin 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. Dworkin 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 mortality. 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 priorities. The book deserves and will undoubtedly receive sustained study and attention.

Robin Friedman