Public Libraries of Suffolk County, New York

Justice for hedgehogs, Ronald Dworkin

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

Justice for hedgehogs

bibliography

Ronald Dworkin

The fox knows many things, the Greeks said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In his most comprehensive work the author argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question. He develops original theories on a great variety of issues very rarely considered in the same book: moral skepticism, literary, artistic, and historical interpretation, free will, ancient moral theory, being good and living well, liberty, equality, and law among many other topics. What we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest. Skepticism in all its forms, philosophical, cynical, or post-modern, threatens that unity. The Galilean revolution once made the theological world of value safe for science. But the new republic gradually became a new empire: the modern philosophers inflated the methods of physics into a totalitarian theory of everything. They invaded and occupied all the honorifics, reality, truth, fact, ground, meaning, knowledge, and being, and dictated the terms on which other bodies of thought might aspire to them, and skepticism has been the inevitable result. The author feels we need a new revolution, and that we must make the world of science safe for value

Baedeker -- Independence. Truth in morals -- External skepticism -- Morals and causes -- Internal skepticism -- Interpretation. Moral responsibility -- Interpretation in general -- Conceptual interpretation -- Ethics. Dignity -- Free will and responsibility -- Morality. From dignity to morality -- Aid -- Harm -- Obligations -- Politics. Political rights and concepts -- Equality -- Liberty -- Democracy -- Law -- Epilogue. Dignity indivisible