Dworkin on ethics and freewill: Comments and questions

Boston University Law Review

Volumn 90, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 657-660

  Sen, Amartya ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77954326096     PISSN: 00068047     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Note

References (15)

1. RONALD DWORHN, JUSTICE FOR HEDGEHOGS (forthcoming 2010) (Apr. 17, 2009 manuscript at 146, on file with the Boston University Law Review).
2. See DAVID HUME, AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING 126 (Anthony Flew ed.. Open Court 1991) (1748).
3. Amartya Kumar Sen, Determinism and Historical Predictions, 2 ENQUIRY 99, 113-15 (1959).
4. ISAIAH BERUN, Introduction to FOUR ESSAYS ON LIBERTY, at xiii (1969).
5. See, e.g., DWORHN, supra note 1 (manuscript at 8-9) (presenting and responding the philosophers who believe a "non-moral metaphysical argument" is necessary to suppose that moral judgments can be true).
6. One caveat, for which if given more time I would have argued, is that Dworkin may have to give more weight to the diverse implications of mental pathology. Mental diseases do exist and are distressingly common, and the significance of a person's judgment may demand a very different treatment when a person's ability to reason - in the normal sense - is in disorder.
7. DWORHN, supra note 1 (manuscript at 128) ("Each person ... must accept that it is a matter of importance that his life be a successful performance rather than a wasted opportunity.").
8. Id.
9. ("Each person has a special, personal responsibility for identifying what counts as success in his own life; he has a personal responsibility to create that life through a coherent narrative that he himself has chosen and endorses.").
10. Id. I may not be thrilled with the disciplinarian tone of these admonitions, but Dworkin's basic point seems to me to be right.
11. This issue is discussed more fully in my essay Amartya Sen, Maximization and the Act of Choice, 65 ECONOMETRICA 745, 771-72 (1997), reprinted in AMARTYA SEN, RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM 158 (2002).
12. John Dewey, Logical Method and Law, 33 PHIL. REV. 560, 567 (1924);
13. see also ISAAC LEVI, HARD CHOICES 220 (1986).
14. In actuality, this variation is not so small.
15. Admittedly, it was read amidst distraction on the beaches of Circe; I could of course have missed something (even though I had greater freedom to read than Ulysses had on the same beach).