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September 21, 2006
I want to pick up on this previous post on Ronald Dworkin's Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate In this text Dworkin is arguing that his two principles---every human life is of intrinsic potential value and that everyone has a responsibility for realizing that value in his own life---together define the basis and conditions of human dignity; that these the principles are sufficiently deep and general so that they can supply common ground for Americans; and that these principles have enough substance so that we can sensibly distinguish and argue about their interpretation and consequences for political institutions and policies. this is a more sophisticated way to approach the issue of common values in a divided culture than the recent political talk about Australian values.
In the first chapter of Is Democracy Possible Dworkin spells out the argument that the first principle, that every human life is of intrinsic potential value, can supply common ground for Americans --and Australians . He does by endeavouring to persuade us first that 'most people think it is intrinsically and objectively important how their own life is lived and then, second, that most people have no reason to think it is objectively any less important how anyone else's life is lived.'
Dworkin's first step is this.
Start with yourself. Do you not think it important that you live your own life well, that you make something of it? Is it not a matter of satisfaction to you and even pride when you think you are doing a good job of living and a matter of remorse and even shame when you think you are doing badly? You may say that in fact you aim at nothing so pretentious as a good life, that you only want to live a decently long time and have fun so long as you live. But you must decide what you mean by that claim. You might mean, first, that a long life full of pleasure is the best kind of life you can live. In that case you actually do think it important to live well, though you have a peculiarly hedonistic conception of what living well means. Or you might mean, second, that indeed you do not care about the goodness of your life as a whole, that you want only pleasure now and in the future.
This addresss the hedonistic utilitarians in our culture who equate happiness with wanting only pleasure out of life. Dworkin's response is this:
Most people think that enjoyment is central to a good life but not the whole story, that relationships and achievements are also important to living well. But even people who do think that pleasure is the only thing that counts actually accept the first principle of dignity for themselves. They think it important that they lead lives that are successful on the whole, which is why they care about pleasure past as well as pleasure to come. So most of us, from both of our supposedly divided political cultures, accept that it is important not just that we enjoy ourselves minute by minute but that we lead lives that are overall good lives to lead. This won't persuade the die hard hedonists but most people would accept that happiness would involve living good lives. Dworkin then makes a significant move: to an objective understanding of a good life:
Most of us also think that the standard of a good life is objective, not subjective in the following sense. We do not think that someone is doing a good job of living whenever he thinks he is; we believe that people can be mistaken about this transcendently important matter. Some people who think that a good life is just a life full of fun day by day later come to believe that this is an impoverished view of what it is to live well. They are converted to the more common view: that a satisfactory life must have some level of close personal relationships, or of important achievement of some sort, or a religious dimension, or greater variety, or something of that sort....It would be very hard....for most of us to give up the idea that there is an objective standard of success in living, that we can be mistaken about what living well means, and that it is a matter of great importance that we not make that mistake.
Many of us would, and do say this, in terms of living a happy life embodied in the market--ie., one of earning lots of money to enjoy ourselves by consuming lots of goods. A life based on drinking lots of wine and food would be an example of how we can make mistakes about what it is to live well, and that these mistakes are matters for very great regret.
Dworkin adds that most of us also:
... think that the importance of our leading successful rather than wasted lives does not depend on our wanting to do so. We want to live good lives because we recognize the importance of doing so, not the other way around...Most of us think that people who do not care what their lives are like, who are only marking time to their graves, are not just different from us in the unimportant way that people are who happen not to care whether the Red Sox win. We think that people who do not care about the character of their lives are defective in a particular and demeaning way: they lack dignity.
The success or failure of any human life is important in itself: it is an objective value.
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