Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin

Author:Ronald Dworkin [Dworkin, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-05-06T13:57:00+00:00

Self-Respect and Respect for Others

Universal or Special?

We hope, remember, to integrate ethics with morality, not simply by incorporating morality into ethics but by achieving a mutually supportive integration of the two in which our thoughts about living well help us to see what our moral responsibilities are: an integration that responds to the traditional philosopher's challenge about what reason we have to be good. We start by considering the implications for morality of the first of our two principles of dignity-that you must treat the success of your own life as a matter of objective importance. In Chapter i I described Kant's principle. This holds that a proper form of self-respect-the self-respect demanded by that first principle of dignity-entails a parallel respect for the lives of all human beings. If you are to respect yourself, you must treat their lives, too, as having an objective importance. Many readers will find that principle immediately appealing, but it is important to pause over its sources and its limits.

If you believe that it is objectively important how your life goes, then you should consider this important question. Do you value your life as objectively important in virtue of something special about your life, so that it would be perfectly consistent for you not to treat other human lives as having the same kind of importance? Or do you value your life in that way because you think all human life is objectively important?

The relationship between you and your life is indeed special: the second principle, of authenticity, assigns you responsibility for it. But that is a different matter. I am asking about the first principle. Do you have a reason to care whether every person's life succeeds or fails, or just whether yours does? True, few people care as much about your situation as you do: your own fate may capture your attention as almost no one else's does. But that can be explained by the special responsibility I just mentioned. So you should focus further on the question whether the objective importance of your life reflects a universal importance-your life has that value only because it is a human life-or a special importance because you have some property that some other people do not have.

Subjective value is in its nature special. Coffee has value only for those who like coffee, and though this might conceivably be all the people alive at a given moment, that could be true only by accident. But objective importance is independent of taste or belief or desire, and it is therefore independent of any distinct emotional relationship, including one based on identity. Because there are no metaphysical value particles, objective value cannot be a bare fact: there must be some case to be made for it. What case could someone make that his importance is special?

Many people hold the opposite, universal view. Many religions teach that a god made human beings in his own image and has equal concern for them all. Secular humanitarians believe that human life is sacred and that the failure of any life is a waste of a cosmically valuable opportunity.

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