Liberal responsibility: A comment on justice for hedgehogs

Boston University Law Review

Volumn 90, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 677-689

  Goldberg, John C P ^a  

^a HARVARD LAW SCHOOL   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77954327602     PISSN: 00068047     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Note

References (51)

1. See, e.g., RONALD DWORKIN, IS DEMOCRACY POSSIBLE HERE: PRINCIPLES FOR A NEW POLITICAL DEBATE 1-23 (2006) (identifying common assumptions that permit conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats to engage in constructive discourse). I mean the phrase "ground-shifting" to be descriptive of a mode of argumentation, not to convey a negative evaluation of it.
2. RONALD DWORKIN, JUSTICE FOR HEDGEHOGS (forthcoming 2010) (Apr. 17, 2009 manuscript, on file with the Boston University Law Review).
3. Posting of Jesse Lee to The White House Blog, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ blog/A-Message-of-Hope-and-Responsibility-for-Americas-Students(Sept. 8, 2009, 04:37 PM EST).
4. President Barack Hussein Obama, Inaugural Speech (Jan. 20, 2009) (transcript available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address).
5. Lee, supra note 3.
6. President Obama's Democratic predecessor was similarly attuned to these concerns, as manifested in his embrace of welfare reform and a "tough on crime" stance. See Noam Scheiber, Op-Ed., The Centrists Didn't Hold, N.Y. TIMES, July 28, 2007, at A15 (discussing the efforts of President Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council to stake out a "centrist" position between conservatives and liberals). My point is not that one who takes responsibility seriously must be committed to these positions. Rather, it is that they figured in a conscious effort by President Clinton to address a political vulnerability to certain charges raised by conservatives.
7. See Ronald Dworkin, Foundations of Liberal Equality, in 11 THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES 1,83 (Grethe B. Peterson ed., 1990).
8. See DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 11).
9. Id.
10. Id. (manuscript at 128).
11. Id. (manuscript at 124).
12. Id. (manuscript at 261).
13. Id. (manuscript at 165-66).
14. Id. (manuscript at 132).
15. Some might reject the idea that one bears a responsibility to construct a coherent life's narrative, as opposed to living one's life in the moment. Others might regard as selfindulgent a conception of ethics that calls on individuals to devote substantial efforts to shaping the arc of their lives, as opposed to giving themselves over to a greater good or cause not of their own making, such as God or Country.
16. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 126).
17. Id. (manuscript at 66).
18. Id. (manuscript at 132) (arguing that authenticity generates a responsibility to "accept judgmental and liability responsibility in appropriate circumstances");
19. see also infra text accompanying notes 39-40 (briefly discussing the ways in which Dworkin may contemplate holding persons answerable for failing to live well).
20. Id. (manuscript at 235-36).
21. Id. (manuscript at 204).
22. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 165). Needless to say, I am not taking a position on how best to interpret Nietzsche.
23. Dworkin suggests that moral philosophers can play the role of "experts" who can provide "templates" for dignified lives.
24. Id. (manuscript at 71).
25. Id. (manuscript at 136).
26. Id. (manuscript at 261).
27. Id. (manuscript at 154-55).
28. See supra Part I.
29. See DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 196).
30. Perhaps the antithesis of existentialism is not objectivity but obligation? 30 This is John Dunn's reading of Locke. JOHN DUNN, THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF JOHN LOCKE: AN HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF THE ARGUMENT OF THE 'TWO TREATISES ON GOVERNMENT' 121-26 (1969);
31. see also JEREMY WALDRON, GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY 13 (2002) (emphasizing the centrality of Christian theology to Locke's thought, and suggesting that it may not be possible today to "shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation").
32. DUNN, supra note 30, at 123.
33. See id. at 251-52.
34. Id.
35. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 162).
36. If I deny being under this duty, am I forced to concede that my life is of no importance?
37. See DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 132).
38. If the duty to live well is as fundamental as Dworkin seems to suppose, one wonders whether there is a case to be made from within his theory for certain coercive responses to those who breach - for example, mandatory ethical training. I am not suggesting that Dworkin in fact endorses coercion of this sort; the question is whether his account permits it. Perhaps he would argue that fulfillment of the duty to live well is incompatible with coercion because coercion necessarily renders the person's life-project no longer her own. This imagined response, however, is unsatisfactory. In principle, at least, coercion could be used merely to enable or incentivize individuals to attend to the construction of their lives.
39. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 128).
40. Id. (manuscript at 159-60).
41. Dworkin relies on the distinction between living well and living a good life to reduce the apparent over-demandingness of the duty to live well. See id. (manuscript at 123-26).
42. Given that we often have little control over whether we can achieve the things for which we strive, he says, the metric for a life well-lived cannot be actual success. While this move promises to shield actors from a certain amount of bad moral luck, it by no means eliminates it. After all, circumstances can easily conspire to impede a person's ability to carry out his life performance.
43. Thanks to Richard Fallon for raising this possibility.
44. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 124);
45. see also id. (manuscript at 129) ("I must recognize the objective importance of my living well, of my life being a successful rather than a failed response to the challenge of living.").
46. But see id. (manuscript at 126) (describing a person who has done a "worse job of living").
47. It may be that the line that demarcates performance from breach is ineffable or at least difficult to define, but it is still a line. In a construction contract, for example, the question sometimes arises whether the builder has "substantially performed" - a possibly misleading phrase meant to describe the point at which the buyer really is getting the thing for which he contracted, even though it deviates in some details from the precise description of the thing contained in the contract. Of course, duties are often defined such that acts that would otherwise amount to a breach of them do not do so when undertaken for the right reasons - e.g., an intentional killing in self-defense. And one can imagine various reasons that might justify failures to attend one's life-performance; for example, growing up in a circumstance in which one is constantly required to sacrifice one's own projects for the well-being of needy family members who cannot expect assistance from any other quarter. I am questioning whether, even in the absence of such reasons, it makes sense to talk about certain lives as amounting to breaches of a duty to live well.
48. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 174-92).
49. Id. (manuscript at 193-95).
50. IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (Liberty Films 1946).
51. DWORKIN, supra note 2 (manuscript at 187).