Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (review)

Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. By Ronald Dworkin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000; pp. 512. $35.00

In the last thirty years, Ronald Dworkin, along with John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Bruce Ackerman, have systematized and refined liberal political philosophy in major ways. Each philosopher has introduced ingenious and often elegant arguments in order to defend and advance his own overlapping and competing conceptions of justice for liberal polities. The pivot for these projects is a "thought experiment," which, like their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century counterparts, is designed to illuminate and distinguish their theories of justice from their competitors' as well as to offer a poetically compelling vision of society. Ronald Dworkin's signature contemporary version of a state of nature is a desert island auction. Imagine, he explains, that its inhabitants desire a just division of resources. After experimenting with various methods, each person would decide that some currency would be agreed upon (Dworkin generally uses clam shells while Locke spoke of a "little piece of yellow metal" in his state of nature), and everything valued on the island would be auctioned off as lots until each person was satisfied. In order to guard against bad luck and differential talents, Dworkin also argues that each inhabitant would select an insurance policy to help protect a fair division.

Part one of Sovereign Virtue is an elaboration of Dworkin's desert island parable, which he first proposed in 1981. Dworkin's state of nature bears some similarities to Rawls's original position, Nozick's anarchic exchanges, and Ackerman's interstellar conversations, particularly in the assumption of individualist premises about needs and wants. Dworkin himself contends that his position is derived from two premises of "ethical individualism": the principle of equal importance, which states that each human life be successful and not be wasted, and the principle of special responsibility, which states that each person is responsible for making her choices of how she should live. Roughly, the hypothetical auction encapsulates the first principle and the hypothetical insurance policy the second.

The most distinguishing aspect of Dworkin's position is that equality is the "sovereign" virtue of society, but he spends the bulk of part one in arguing that equality of welfare is not the proper benchmark. In Rawls's formulation, the original position--from which persons attempt to intuit principles of justice behind a "veil of ignorance" in which individual talents as well as religion and race are unknown--requires adoption of the "difference principle." The difference principle stipulates that resources be distributed unequally only when the disadvantaged are benefited. Dworkin insists, however, that equality of resources is the only justifiable formulation of equality, and he offers some delightful arguments about the problem of "expensive tastes" to help make his point. Suppose, he asks, that a paraplegic violinist prefers a Stradivarius to an equally expensive piece of equipment that will help him lead a more normal life. Those who lead limited lives in other respects might justifiably complain about the additional taxes for the instrument from an equality of welfare standpoint.

The second part of Sovereign Virtue, adapted from later articles written for theNew York Review of Books, is an application of the concept of equality of resources to various current public policy issues, including campaign finance, affirmative action, welfare reform, genetic manipulation, inheritance taxation, gay rights, and euthanasia. One of the hallmarks of Dworkin's approach is his willingness to confront in detail public controversy where other philosophers are more reticent. Dworkin himself regards this enterprise as not one of application but rather as an "inside-out" approach rather than an "outside-in" one (3). Whatever the characterization, it is in this second part that one begins to see the liabilities of his method. First, there is the question that has been raised by numerous critics about Dworkin's policy recommendations. The bottom line is that, without exception, his conclusions correspond to conventional positions...