This is *such* crap -- ignorant pomo-bashing (he quotes not one single line or one single thinker), plus turgid neo-Kantian drivel about how it's just so terribly difficult to judge anything these days. A fine example of the types of individuals who thrive in the corporatized university system.
- -- Dennis
The last thing I read of Dworkin was many yrs. ago in TNR> review of Rawls and Nozick, so I'm far from expert in his stuff but, take a look at the notes to the article that Luke posted. Michael Pugliese
Footnotes Copyright 1996 by Ronald Dworkin.
I have been lecturing and teaching on the subject of this essay for many years, and more people have discussed and criticized my ideas than I can acknowledge or remember. Particular thanks are due to Paul Boghossian, Ruth Chang, G. A. Cohen, Donald Davidson, James Dreier, Stephen Guest, Derek Parfit, Thomas Scanlon, Nicos Stavropoulos, Sigrun Svavarsdottir, and David Wiggins, to the members of the New York University Law School Colloquium on Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy, and to my teaching colleagues Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. The essay will appear in a collection of essays on incommensurabilty, edited by Ruth Chang, to be published by Harvard University Press in the fall of 1997.
1. "Skepticism" is used in different ways. I use it in the sense not of agnosticism but of rejection. I emphasize that different skeptics, even about morality, have different targets. The skeptics I mainly discuss claim to reject not morality but only certain philosophical opinions about it.
2. Whether a form of skepticism is properly understood as internal or selectively external to the domain it criticizes is often a complex interpretive question. Science-based skepticism about religion is internal, for example, if religion is understood to be itself part of the domain of science, as it should be if it includes causal claims about the origin of the universe competitive with other cosmological claims.
3. I have discussed this distinction before. See my Law's Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 78-86.
4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
5. Richard Rorty, "Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions?," in The Future of Academic Freedom, ed. Louis Menand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 29-30.
6. Not, that is, if they are sensible. I am not considering here the patently false view that it is part of the very meaning of "correct" that right actions are those that maximize happiness. If that were right, only utilitarians could avoid linguistic error.
7. See Hilary Putnam, "On Properties," in his Philosophical Papers, Volume I, Mathematics, Matter, and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), at p. 305.
8. Compare the discussion of "subjective naturalism" in M. Davies and L. Humberstone, "Two Notions of Necessity," Philosophical Studies 00 (1980): 22-25. The subjectivism discussed there is personal; something being wrong is taken to be a matter of the speaker disliking it. The argument in the text, which addresses the less implausible example of intersubjective subjectivism, would of course apply to the personal version as well.
9. That is the sense of "represents" that Crispin Wright uses in exploring the question whether moral beliefs can represent reality. See Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). I return to Wright's discussion later.
10. Ibid.
11. Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 154.
12. Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 172-73.
13. Ibid., p. 174.
14. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 40.
15. That is a crude statement of a prominent and influential account of interpretation. See Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
16. See Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
17. See, for example, the literature described in Robert Wright, The Moral Animal (New York: Pantheon, 1994).
18. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 431.
19. I say "all" sides to include the possibility that I see no good reason for thinking the issue indeterminate either.
20. I defend a different but in some ways similar view about ethics in "Foundations of Liberal Equality," in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume XI, ed. Grethe Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1990).
21. For a fuller exposition of the argument of this paragraph, see "No Right Answer?" in my book, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
22. John Mackie argued that a legal theory that made moral argument relevant would characteristically produce indeterminacy. See his "The Third Theory of Law," Philosophy & Public Affairs 7, no. 1 (Fall 1977): 3-16.
23. See the discussion of "Critical Legal Studies" in my Law's Empire, pp. 271-74.