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August 30, 2006
In an earlier post we established that our political life is marked by a kind war between two armed camps--conservative and liberal and that this unbridgeable divide --and lack of a common ground--- has resulted in a lack of debate about policy options and different kinds of politics. How does Dworkin address this? He says:
That in spite of the popular opinion [about the unbridgeable divide} we actually can find shared principles of sufficient substance to make a national political debate possible and profitable. These are very abstract, indeed philosophical, principles about the value and the central responsibilities of a human life. I suppose not that every American would immediately accept these principles, but that enough Americans on both sides of the supposedly unbridgeable divide would accept them if they took sufficient care to understand them.
Dworkin says that these principles are sufficiently basic so that a liberal or conservative interpretation of them will ramify across the entire spectrum of political attitudes. What are these deep shared principles?
Dworkin says that:
The first principle--which I shall call the principle of intrinsic value---holds that each human life has a special kind of objective value. It has value as potentiality; once a human life has begun, it matters how it goes. It is good when that life succeeds and its potential is realized and bad when it fails and its potential is wasted. This is a matter of objective, not merely subjective value; I mean that a human life's success or failure is not only important to the person whose life it is or only important if and because that is what he wants.. The success or failure of any human life is important in itself, something we all have reason to want or to deplore.
The second principle is the principle of personal responsibility and it:
...holds that each person has a special responsibility for realizing the success of his own life, a responsibility that includes exercising his judgment about what kind of life would be successful for him. He must not accept that anyone else has the right to dictate those personal values to him or impose them on him without his endorsement. He may defer to the judgments codified in a particular religious tradition or to those of religious leaders or texts or, indeed, of secular moral or ethical instructors. But that deference must be his own decision; it must reflect his own deeper judgment about how to acquit his sovereign responsibility for his own life.
Dworkin says that these two principles together define the basis and conditions of human dignity, and that are individualistic in this formal sense--- they attach value to and impose responsibility on individual people one by one--but not a substantive sense. He adds that he makes two claims for these principles.
I claim, first, that the principles are sufficiently deep and general so that they can supply common ground for Americans from both political cultures into which we now seem divided...I claim, second, that in spite of their depth and generality, these principles have enough substance so that we can sensibly distinguish and argue about their interpretation and consequences for political institutions and policies.
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