How Equal Can We Be? - Review - book review

Commonweal, Dec 15, 2000 by David McCabe

Sovereign Virtue
The Theory and Practice of Equality
Ronald Dworkin
Harvard University Press, $35, 512 pp.

Second only to John Rawls in his influence on contemporary liberal theory, Ronald Dworkin has matched his prolific first-class work in legal and political philosophy with a steady stream of essays in the New York Review of Books. Those essays (four of which serve as chapters in this book) have made him familiar to scores of intelligent readers beyond the academy. His uncommon ability to move between the worlds of rigorous philosophical analysis and a broader readership is mirrored in the division of Sovereign Virtue into two parts.

In part 1 ("Theory"), Dworkin explores what the norm of human equality demands of a political community. Rejecting the profitless notion that it mandates treating all persons equally (I don't violate equality in any worrisome way when I give students different grades on their papers), Dworkin stresses that equality requires treating all with equal concern. But what does this involve, exactly?

In the lengthy essay, first published in 1981, that makes up the first two chapters, Dworkin argues that equal concern cannot require ensuring equal welfare for all. Aside from its enormous pragmatic difficulties, the goal of equal welfare is, Dworkin insists, conceptually incoherent: since people differ in their conceptions of welfare (is it pleasure? preference-satisfaction? objectively valuable goods?), to rely on any such conception privileges some people over others and thus violates equality. Instead, Dworkin claims that equal concern requires that all citizens be provided equal resources with which to pursue their life plans. This does not mean that someone's level of resources may never surpass anyone else's. Distributional schemes demanding that sort of equality inevitably fail to respond to individual choice, ambition, and responsibility: if I work hard and sacrifice much, while you mostly sunbathe, it is no affront to fairness if I come to have greater resources than you. So long as our inequality results from choices we have made (which may include different choices when faced with risk), and so long as we began from equal starting points, you cannot complain of injustice.

The rub, of course, is that few begin from equal starting points, and here significant questions arise for Dworkin's account. Dworkin wants distributive justice to be sensitive to those particularities for which we are responsible (my diligence, your fecklessness), but not to reflect those which result from brute luck (my inborn talents, your poor parents). But it is often quite hard to distinguish the two. To be sure, some cases are straightforward: those born with severe physical handicaps face undeserved hardship, and Dworkin's solution, while perhaps difficult to enact (it involves a complicated hypothetical insurance scheme in which we imagine the premium that those ignorant of their own condition would pay to be compensated if they turn out to be handicapped), is not in principle objectionable. But how much are my diligence, my willingness to delay short-term gratification, the result of my own effort (thus legitimating my greater share of the pie), and how much do they result from my nurturing family environment or personality traits I inherited, neither of which I deserve and which cannot sanction unequal resources?

A related charge can be leveled at Dworkin's willingness to regard natural talents as shared resources whose distribution is subject to the interests of the collective. In criticizing John Rawls, Michael Sandel has famously argued that such a liberal orientation--what Sandel calls the idea of the unencumbered self--undermines our deepest sense of who we are and what we may ultimately call our own, and the same problem threatens Dworkin's account.

Concerns like these have been directed against Dworkin since his argument first appeared almost twenty years ago, and readers will be disappointed that he has chosen to reprint his original argument unaltered, rather than revise it to engage the rich debate it has engendered. What that debate has revealed, some would claim, is that our commitment to equalizing life chances, though critical to political morality for reasons Dworkin articulates, does not tell the whole story. Some acquiescence to fate, some recognition of personal autonomy, some respect for the privacy of the family, are just three factors that may work against the ideal of equality as Dworkin understands it. My guess is that acknowledging such factors need not seriously weaken Dworkin's argument for a broadly egalitarian scheme that corrects for certain unjust and arbitrary circumstances (conditions of severe poverty, for example) while still allowing differences in wealth that reflect our inescapable sense of personal merit. I would have liked to see Dworkin make that case more directly.

In the rest of part 1, Dworkin tracks the implications of equality through various theoretical inquiries: the relation between equality and liberty, the notion of political equality, and--to my mind most interesting--the question of whether one's ability to lead a good life is compromised by living in a society with serious injustice. He reasons that since one can lead a truly good life only in the right circumstances, and since such circumstances are met only in a society committed to equality of resources, the connection between leading a good life and inhabiting a just society follows naturally. Too naturally, readers may think: Dworkin appears simply to have smuggled into his conception of a good life precisely what is in question. But he also hints at a deeper argument, one involving the importance in a good life of relations of mutual respect, civic friendship, and the shared sense of maintaining a healthy polity. This way of making the point seems to me much more persuasive.