Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
397
result(s) for
"Ronald Dworkin"
Sort by:
Ronald Dworkin: Seeking Truth and Justice through Responsibility
According to Dworkin, “truth” is an interpretative concept. Why? Moral judgements are often the subject of disagreement because they are often the result of divergent conceptual understandings. If, on the other hand, we want to interpret concepts correctly, we have to deal with the analysis of the underlying values we attach to these concepts. Dworkin understands the true as a matter of interpretation, which—and this is often misunderstood—is capable of producing a correct conception of the truth. The truth is thereby directly related to justice. Dworkin even ties his theory of interpretation to an objective truth that can only produce conclusive reasons for a specific advocacy of a particular position in an argument after responsible and intensive debate—in the sense of his two-stage theory. In fact, it turns out that Dworkin’s search for and conception of an objective truth describes a (historical) process. We interpret what our ancestors have already interpreted and continue to understand (in a modified way). This reflexive responsibility is ours to bear; according to Dworkin, it is our responsibility to always stand up for truth through good arguments.
Journal Article
There's Nothing Quasi About Quasi-Realism: Moral Realism as a Moral Doctrine
This paper seeks to clarify and defend the proposition that moral realism is best elaborated as a moral doctrine. I begin by upholding Ronald Dworkin's anti-Archimedean critique of the error theory against some strictures by Michael Smith, and I then briefly suggest how a proponent of moral realism as a moral doctrine would respond to Smith's defense of the Archimedeanism of expressivism. Thereafter, this paper moves to its chief endeavor. By differentiating clearly between expressivism and quasi-realism (or moral realism as a moral doctrine), the paper highlights both their distinctness and their compatibility. In so doing, it underscores the affinities between Blackburnian quasi-realism and moral realism as a moral doctrine. Finally, this paper contends—in line with my earlier work on these matters—that moral realism as a moral doctrine points to the need for some reorienting of meta-ethical enquiries rather than for the abandoning of them.
Journal Article
Dignity in the legal and political philosophy of Ronald Dworkin
Well-known for his contribution to the juristic world, Professor Ronald Dworkin was an outstanding legal philosopher of his generation. This volume celebrates the thoughts of Ronald Dworkin on dignity. The contributors have critically engaged with different perspectives of Dworkin's thoughts on dignity. The aim is to shed light on juridical and moral contemporary conundrums such as the role of dignity in constitutional contexts in India, and the understanding of dignity as either a foundation of human rights or as a supra value that illuminates other values and rights.
BOOK
Thomas Aquinas, Ronald Dworkin, and the Fourth Revolution: The Foundations of Law in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Since the publication of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the strategies of Surveillance Capitalists and appropriate responses to them have become common points of discussion across several fields. However, there is relatively little literature addressing challenges that Surveillance Capitalism raises for the foundations of law. This article outlines Surveillance Capitalism and then compares the views of Thomas Aquinas and Ronald Dworkin in four areas: truth and reality, reality and law, interpretation and social custom, and virtue and law; finally, it closes by asking whether the law alone can provide a sufficient response to Surveillance Capitalism. The overarching argument of the article is that, while Aquinas’s view of the foundations of law accounts for and responds to the challenges of Surveillance Capitalism more effectively than Dworkin’s, law alone cannot provide a sufficient response to this emerging phenomenon.
Journal Article
Political Moralism and Constitutional Reasoning: A Reply to Bernard Williams
Williams’s well-known critique of the ‘moralism’ of liberal political philosophy—its disconnect from political reality—holds special significance for the theory and practice of constitutional adjudication, where calls for ‘realism’ increasingly resound. Is constitutional discourse also guilty of moralism—as Williams himself thought—or might it succeed where political philosophy has failed? This paper reconstructs Williams’s critique of political moralism as one that decries the empty idealism of the philosophical project of abstraction: the quest for general, timeless, and universal principles drains theory of its prescriptive force. It then argues that legal-constitutional reasoning, even in its most ambitious ‘forum of principle’ conception, is not a flight to abstraction but precisely a pragmatist negotiation of the concreteness-abstraction tension through acts of justification. But constitutional discourse in its current form remains moralistic in another distinct sense: it idealizes the political, thereby failing to account for the social and political pressures on courts and the proper normative significance of institutional considerations. Constitutional discourse could only offer a solution to the ailments of political philosophy if it cures its own chronic idealization.
Journal Article
WARMING UP TO INSCRUTABILITY
In this article, I discuss how technological development could change the way that we think about the essential features of legality. In particular, I focus on the strengths and weaknesses of machine learning in the context of legislation and adjudication. I argue that the content of those essential features could depend upon our willingness to make tradeoffs between intelligibility and results. These tradeoffs might lead us to reject a concept that requires critical officials (HLA Hart), reasonbased tests of legitimacy ( Joseph Raz), or deep justifications for coercion (Ronald Dworkin). I conclude that our concept of law will likely be shaped by our willingness to accept a growing disconnect between the way that we decide and the way that the system does.
Journal Article
La constitution de la démocratie
D’où la démocratie tire-t-elle sa valeur ? De ce que le plus grand nombre y exerce le pouvoir politique ? Ou bien de la protection des droits et des libertés que ses institutions législatives, exécutives et judiciaires garantissent à chaque personne ? Connu en France en tant que philosophe du droit, penseur du libéralisme et des fondements de la justice sociale, Ronald Dworkin a aussi développé une conception originale de la démocratie. Pour lui, la démocratie n’est pas une procédure, mais une communauté, organisée autour des principes de participation, de réciprocité et d’indépendance éthique. Ces principes politiques et moraux sous-tendent la constitution et informent les relations entre ses citoyens. C’est pourquoi l’opposition entre autogouvernement et protection des libertés relève d’une fausse alternative : les juges constitutionnels, en particulier, qui ont la charge d’interpréter le sens et l’étendue des droits, ne s’opposent pas à la réalisation de l’idéal démocratique. Au contraire : pour Dworkin, leur rôle est d’assurer que la communauté se gouverne conformément à ses principes et demeure, ainsi, une démocratie authentique.
eBook
Ronald Dworkin and the Curious Case of the Floodgates Argument
This article juxtaposes a jurisprudential thesis and a practical problem in an attempt to gain critical insight into both. The jurisprudential thesis is Dworkin’s rights thesis. The practical problem revolves around judicial resort to the floodgates argument in civil adjudication (or, more specifically, a version of this argument focused on adjudicative resources, which is dubbed here the FA). The analysis yields three principal observations: (1) Judicial resort to the FA is discordant with the rights thesis. (2) The rights thesis is instructive in one way but mistaken in another. While Dworkin has highlighted some valid and sound reasons against judicial policymaking, his conclusive exclusion of judicial policymaking from civil law adjudication is erroneous. Civil law adjudication, it is argued, is an arena of ineliminable tension between principle and policy. (3) The FA is a type of policy argument particularly vulnerable to objections against judicial policymaking. There should, therefore, be a (rebuttable) presumption against judicial resort to it.
Journal Article