Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality

To libertarians out there...read this book and you will understand exactly why liberalism has changed in America. Brilliant, provocative and insightful all around. I pick it up every year or so and re-read certain sections for fun. If you can understand his points (particularly about hypothetical insurance markets) you will be hard pressed to disagree with them. I desperately wish this book would get the credit it deserves.

Just as physicists search for the unifying theory of particle physics and the universe, Professor Dworkin here presents a theory that unifies the sometimes conflicting aspirations of liberty and equality. As usual, his work is not only replete with insights but is frequently extremely profound - especially when he explains what should have been obvious to us but has somehow eluded our vision. Dworkin explains how liberty should not compromise equality without in turn compromising liberty itself. He gives us a new tool for evaluating the merits of changes in the law. As a lawyer and educator, I find this to be a very readable and noteworthy contribution to legal philosophy.

With Sovereign Virtue, Ronald Dworkin finally presents his political theory in a form convenient for the general reader, stripped of the specialized arguments about jurisprudence on which he has built his reputation. The issue in Sovereign Virtue is not how judges should decide cases, but what kind of equality between individuals government should secure and maintain. For Dworkin, liberal egalitarianism strives to make the effects of personal choice dominate over those of individual luck. "When and how far is it right that individuals bear disadvantages or misfortunes of their own situations themselves, and when is it right, on the contrary, that others-the other members of the community in which they live, for example-relieve them from or mitigate the consequences of these disadvantages?" (p. 287). His answer is that "individuals should be relieved of consequential responsibility for those unfortunate features of their situation that are brute bad luck, but not from those that should be seen as flowing from their own choices" (p. 287). In this way, Dworkin claims to strike the right balance between collective and personal responsibility......if one makes it past the many pedantic issues Dworkin raises, one will finally come to the provocative, practical nub of his political theory: the distinction between fair and unfair differences in wealth. All philosopher's puzzles aside, Sovereign Virtue calls for a continuous redistribution of wealth much more massive than what is effected now. Dworkin gives no concrete figures, but he believes that "the wealth of everyone in a fair society would be much closer to the average than is true in America now: the great extremes between rich and poor that mark our economic life now would have largely disappeared" (p. 312). Only such a very large redistribution, he contends, would render persons tolerably equal in the extent to which their fates are determined by things beyond their control, but would also leave each person's fate sensitive to the choices he actually makes. Dworkin also argues for a universal health-care system, a more generous welfare scheme, greater regulations on campaign expenditures and contributions, and race-sensitive admissions policies. But all of these positions, with the possible exception of the last, issue directly from the fundamental inequity Dworkin sees in the free-market distribution of wealth......Are the advantages accruing to lucky owners of "wealth-talent" any different in principle from the advantages conferred by very selective universities to the lucky owners of the endowment of being black? As F. A. Hayek once noted, the free market does not recognize merit or desert in any objective sense, but simply the value others place on one's capacities or services. "Our problem is whether it is desirable that people should enjoy advantages in proportion to the benefits which their fellows derive from their activities or whether the distribution of these advantages should be based

If you're willing to expend the energy on Dworkin's dense, abstract prose in the first section, you'll be rewarded in the second section wherein he applies his abstractions to tough issues like national healthcare, and genetic manipulation. Dworkin sometimes sounds like an insurance analyst -- he tends to think in terms of spreading risk across populations. He also likes to build models to help conceptualize the distribution of risk and reward in society. These models, fully understood, provide a means of gauging all kinds of propositions: propositions about genetic experimentation, economic inequality, healthcare, to name just a few that he covers in the second section. The problem is that it takes a long time for Dworkin to set up these models that one begins to lose sight of just why such a conceptual tool might be worthwhile (for instance, a desert island where everyone arrives on an equal footing and the auction that ensues to distribute resources equally according to preference.) At the same time, there is something heartening about Dworkin's insistence that rationality can prevail, that reasonable people can agree on certain basic assumptions about the importance of public goods and ways in which these goods might be attained. One wants to believe that this is the case, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary, especially in our current political discourse, so polarized as not to admit any room for the intrusion of reason. A noble try, really. Overall, a tough book, but a rewarding one.