Grasping at the Grail

The Ancient Greek poet Archilochus wrote: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” As intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin later explained in his 1953 essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, Archilochus’ words indicate the way in which different people see the world. Berlin lumped thinkers such as Dante, Plato, Hegel, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche in the category of hedgehog, as those who relate everything to a single coherent principle or system of understanding. He thought Shakespeare, Erasmus, Goethe, and Joyce, on the other hand, were foxes, more likely to see the world as composed of many unconnected, perhaps self-contradictory fragments.
Foxes rule the world today. By and large, people are uncomfortable ascribing the workings of the universe to a single coherent system, or living by the thought that we can fit our various opinions and beliefs together into a perfectly compatible whole. However, it is the hedgehog and its one big idea that Ronald Dworkin, a prominent professor of law and philosophy at New York University and regular contributor of the New York Review of Books, defends in his recent work, Justice for Hedgehogs. Dworkin wants to persuade the reader that our ideas about ethics, morality, and politics are interconnected in a single network of values, and that, moreover, there is truth to be sought within this network. This is a pretty big idea.
Dworkin, who has a long career of advancing extremely interesting, often controversial arguments in moral philosophy and legal theory, appears to be on the losing side today, both in popular culture and in the academy. Religious fundamentalism aside, people are hesitant to argue that their convictions about abortion or war or torture, deep and stirring though they may be, are full-blown truths. The notion of objective truth has ceased to be a serious topic among philosophers and scholars of the humanities, replaced by a safer, kinder, and foxier pluralism that embraces the potential for different, conflicting values to exist. Politicians speak not about groping toward what democracy really means, but of negotiating between the values that inevitably clash in the real world.
The Realm of Values 
Despite our philosophically fragmented climate, Dworkin makes a strong argument for the interconnectedness of value through an important re-conceptualization of what value is. The key principle Dworkin uses to draw the boundaries about his terrain is what he describes as the “metaphysical independence” of value, an insight he draws from philosopher David Hume. This somewhat daunting term points to the distinction between facts of the real world and the normative opinions we hold about them. According to this principle, concrete realities tell us nothing about which of our normative beliefs are correct. While we may prove our physical existence by pointing to the atoms that configure such a thing as you or me, there are no such “morally charged particles” that make the moral beliefs we hold true or false. According to Dworkin, only a substantive moral argument can do the job—an argument, that is, standing solely upon further moral claims. This is the idea of the hedgehog. Such an argument will depend on values outside of the particular case, and ultimately fall or stand based on the coherency of one’s framework of values. The truth of a moral claim depends on that of another moral basis, and thus, writes Dworkin, “the argument ends when it meets itself, if it ever does.”
So moral values have nothing to do with the physical world, and everything to do with other moral values. How exactly, then, should we conceptualize them? According to Dworkin, we can see moral values as “interpretive concepts.” These are concepts that we can agree touch upon something dear to us, but we disagree about how exactly they should be characterized or identified. We agree enough about the idea of equality, for example, that when we argue about disparities in income, we recognize we’re talking about the same concept. Yet we differ when it comes to what shape this notion should take. Our disagreement is not merely superficial; we really do disagree about what equality entails.
For many of us, we are always negotiating conflicts between values in our own heads as well. In Dworkin’s hedgehog view, however, if we are true to our values (like equality and liberty), they will not and cannot conflict. For instance, say your friend asks you for your thoughts on a project that she believes will be a huge success. You don’t think she’s going to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, but you know telling the truth will be brutal. Is there a conflict between your values of honesty and kindness? Dworkin doesn’t think so. According to him, we search for the right answer by drawing upon our other convictions, thus re-interpreting our values of kindness and honesty and dissipating the conflict. So William James was mistaken when he lectured, “Some part of the ideal must be butchered” as one goes through life. Dworkin believes this is a misperception. The foxes are wrong: values do not conflict.
Personally, I am left uncertain. In the bulk of the book, Dworkin examines a variety of values such as liberty, equality, and morality, but he reinterprets them by returning again and again to the principle of dignity, which he designates as fundamental. Arguably, in a world where values did rub against each other at their concrete meeting-edges, one could do the same: sacrifice bits of these ideals in an effort to make the choice that best reflected some deeper principle, whether dignity or something else.
The point I believe Dworkin makes most persuasively, though, is that whatever explanation may sound more compelling about the interactions of values, we should not assume values stand in conflicting relationships. Moreover, the fact that we are initially pulled in different directions does not mean there is no morally superior decision. For instance, what if I have thoroughly considered existing arguments for and against affirmative action, and neither side seems more convincing than the other? I am, says Dworkin, “entitled without more ado to declare that I am uncertain.” Uncertainty is different from the popular conclusion that there is no right answer. Indeterminacy, which declares that a right answer cannot even exist, requires a strong positive case in order to be available as an option. In our own day, politicians and philosophers alike cringe at claiming that one community’s values are “more true” or its political institutions are “more just.” However, Dworkin argues that claiming indifference about truth is indeed an abdication of moral responsibility.
This independence of morality is a very powerful principle. For example, one popular worry it dismisses is the origins of our moral values. Doesn’t it worry you that you might only believe abortion to be wrong because you were raised by blue-blooded liberals? And that, were you raised in a Mormon community instead, you might recoil at despoiling the sanctity of life? If we accept the sovereignty of morality, the question of origins need not worry us. Dworkin argues that while the sources of our moral opinions may be contingent, whether or not one believes that these opinions are true is an entirely different matter. I might believe that abortion is wrong because of my upbringing, but whether my view is true or not is an issue with which I will still have to struggle. One must trace out to the best of their ability how a particular view fits alongside the rest of his moral values in order to ascertain truth. “Morality stands or falls on its own credentials,” Dworkin argues, and “can neither be vindicated nor impeached” except through convincing moral argument.
Arguing Within Morality 
Even if we disagree about moral values, and this disagreement may in part be influenced by our surroundings, such dissonance does not mean that there is no truth in our values. The “Archimedean” argument that one can simply debunk the entire moral enterprise from a position outside of morality is one that Dworkin has long criticized (see, for example, his 1996 article “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It”). Values only exist in a moral realm: in order for a moral conclusion to have any substance, it must be made on moral terms. According to Dworkin, there is no meta-ethical position from which to debunk morality.
Dworkin offers us an illustration via four students discussing abortion. Student A argues that abortion is wrong. She states: “Everyone always has a categorical reason (a reason that exists regardless of personal interests) to condemn abortion.” Student B argues that sometimes, abortion is morally required. “In cases of rape,” he argues, “everyone always has a categorical reason to abort.” Student C interrupts: “Actually, there is no categorical reason either way. No one has to condemn or embrace abortion. It’s always permissible but never mandatory.” Finally, Student D dismisses the rest: “You are all wrong. Abortion is never morally prohibited, required, or permissible.” D’s view, which follows from an Archimedean skepticism, is not a real option in Dworkin’s account. The author argues that the important aspect of each speaker’s arguments is the conclusion each makes for the morality of abortion. While D has attempted to make a statement that says nothing about morality, he has taken the position that there are no categorical reasons for or against abortion, just like the morally-speaking C. According to Dworkin, this amounts to a moral position. It therefore makes no sense for D to argue that moral stances do not exist in this case, because he has effectively taken one.
This is a controversial claim that ruffles the feathers of meta-ethicists in philosophy departments across the country. Russ Shafer-Landau, a philosopher at the University of Wisconsin, says his “initial unease grew steadily to something approaching panic” as he grasped Dworkin’s view that “meta-ethics is largely a sham.” Indeed, many of us will still feel that while D’s statement might have the same consequence as C’s, it is of a different species of claims. What is persuasive, though, is that D’s statement needs just as much of a substantive argument as any of the others’.
Objective Truth 
Despite his belief in genuine moral disagreement, Dworkin still holds that objective truth exists. Throughout the book, the non-philosopher will likely question what exactly the author means by “objective” truth. As one illustration, Dworkin asserts that something can be true even if no one thought so. As another, he claims the morality or immorality of something resides in the thing itself, instead of in our subjective feelings about the matter.
Yet from my reading, Dworkin’s defense of this bare kind of objective truth seems to sit somewhat uneasily alongside his idea that all moral values are interpretive concepts. After all, a subjective and contingent community of individuals ultimately defines and interprets such concepts. Dworkin does not justify the jarring relationship between the contingency of those interpretive concepts with his thought that truth exists independently of what we subjective individuals think. Upon consideration, I wonder whether for Dworkin, objectivity is better understood as a conceptual quality, rather than characterizing a separate ontology of “objective truth.” Perhaps the seeming friction between concept and truth evidences instead objectivity’s ultimate dependence on concept. I hesitantly imagine Dworkin to feel that while there may be an objective truth to justice without us humans having formed a concept of justice, what exactly that truth is does depend on the shape of that concept.
In a more striking case, Dworkin argues that given the independence of value, we cannot claim there has been moral progress throughout history. The judgment that moral progress has occurred is based on the judgment that the past practices we now condemn are immoral. This is a claim Dworkin emphasizes needs a moral argument of its own. For example, that people did not recognize slavery’s immorality due to false empirical beliefs about human beings works to “assume rather than support” the conviction that slavery is wrong. We still need some independent moral argument that our views today are somehow better, “and that independent judgment of improvement, on its own, is all we could mean by progress.”
Dworkin acknowledges we might find using the term “truth” uncomfortable, and that we would rather edge toward a friendlier “most reasonable.” However, Dworkin believes this is not a useful move. He argues that “any alternate endorsing term for interpretive judgments would have to signify, if it is to fit what we think, exactly what ‘true’ signifies: unique success.” This works if we take up Dworkin’s suggestion that we see truth as an interpretive concept like morals, thus creating a broader conception embracing all domains of inquiry, from science to morality. The succinct definition of truth that Dworkin presents is sufficiently abstract to cover both domains (I think you might have removed the definition of truth as unique success, do you think we need to put it back in for this to make sense?). However, we habitually attribute to truth the characteristics it most clearly evidences in a domain like science: that of matching reality. We have already seen that according to Dworkin, practical reality does not play a role in our moral arguments. Perhaps this only shows the unhelpful attributes we have lodged onto the idea of truth, as a result of our long readiness to tie the domains of facts and value together. We would have good cause, then, to think about truth and reasonableness under an alternate, more abstract concept.
Moral Responsibility 
Despite this talk of truth versus most reasonableness, moral disagreements “all the way down” can exist. You and I might make moral claim after moral claim, and still stand at a crossroads. But while I might not be able to bring you around to how I understand things, Dworkin argues that we can still strive for something more important: coming to and practicing our beliefs responsibly. “Two people who both reason responsibly and find conviction in what they believe will reach different conclusions about what is right and wrong. But they will share the belief that there is a getting it right and a getting it wrong about what is right and wrong.” Even if a third person challenges that shared belief, “We must each believe what we responsibly believe.” Morally responsible people “act out of rather than in spite of their convictions,” says Dworkin. Addressing our sociological contingency, the author admits we all have “unstudied moral convictions.” Moral responsibility means that we must examine and interpret these convictions with the principles of overall coherence and personal resonance in mind. Through this process, we can turn our initially “unformed, compartmentalized, abstract, and therefore porous” convictions into a denser, broader filter through which we can make decisions ringing true for ourselves.
Dworkin’s conception of moral responsibility raises the question: can people at moral odds converge on truth, instead of circling one another round and round? Dworkin demands two things of us as morally responsible individuals: coherence among our moral values, and authenticity in seeking those convictions that “grip us strongly enough to play the role of filters when we are pressed by competing motives.” Yet I wonder, to what exactly are we being authentic? One can easily imagine values that link snugly with one another, but with what moral core are they aligning or breaking? And if we each manage to polish a set of values both cohering and making personal sense, does anything grant we will do more than enforce the inherited, contingent convictions that may lie within that moral core? Dworkin does admit, “[w]e cannot escape a sense of the airiness and contingency of our interpretive convictions because we know that other people do think what we cannot think and that there is no lever of argument that we can press to convince them.” “Still,” it is important to note, “for all that, we are left only with uncertainty, not nihilism.”
Dworkin’s Re-Conceptualizations
By re-conceptualizing what we really mean when talking about values, and distinguishing the realm of value from that of concrete reality, Dworkin casts new light on the ways we have long seen concepts such as truth and morality, all the while critiquing such views. In my own opinion, the most significant and successful is the attack against critical Archimedeanism—the view that one can stand outside morality to discredit the entire enterprise. By distinguishing uncertainty (not being convinced of the greater veracity of one side over the other) from indeterminacy (the non-existence of a right answer), Dworkin has discredited the latter as a default position to take, by demanding of those who advance it a good reason for their beliefs.
For Archimedean skepticism to be successful, it must be both independent of morality and pertinent to it, conditions that are impossible to fulfill together. We can, for example, argue that we understand morals through a certain kind of nerve in the back of our brain. This is a claim that is indeed independent of morality. But it bears no relevance to how we could make sense of what is right or wrong–only how neurons fire about cranium.
Removing indeterminacy as a default position has massive implications in a variety of domains, including within the personal ethics of our own lives, an issue Dworkin devotes a good chapter of the book upon. The author advances his own view of what a life lived well entails. We value human lives well lived because, like a work of art, “they too embody a performance: a rising to the challenge of having a life to lead. The final value of our lives is adverbial, not adjectival…. It is the value of a brilliant dance or dive when the memories have faded and the ripples died away.” Dworkin acknowledges some may feel differently, and that this sense of life’s objective value may well be a myth. Yet the unavailability of an Archimedean perspective means one cannot simply fall back upon the claim that life is devoid of meaning. Dworkin admonishes, “you need just as strong a set of value judgments to support your nihilism as others need to support their very different intuitive sense,” an argument of what would be needed for life to be meaningful, and why these conditions cannot be met. Thus, adds Dworkin, “Nihilism so earned has its own dignity.”
Although Dworkin fights for the existence of truth throughout the truth, he freely admits we may never grasp that grail. We may continue to disagree in fundamental ways about fundamental moral questions. Yet, when faced with the question of why not simply dropping truth, Dworkin’s answer rings with the kind of dignity of conviction that perhaps reflects his own beliefs of what a life lived well entails. Holding onto truth “keeps before us the deepest philosophical challenge of this domain: to make sense of the idea that there is unique success to be had in inquiry, even when that inquiry is interpretive rather than empirical or logical, even when that inquiry admits no demonstration and promises no convergence.” In Justice for Hedgehogs, Ronald Dworkin puts up a solid fight to preserve this challenge for generations to come.