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Liberalism and Paternalism: A Critique of Ronald Dworkin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Christopher Wolfe
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Extract

Leading liberal theorist Ronald Dworkin builds a case against paternalism, rooted in his liberal ethical theory, especially the requirement of ethical integrity. But his case is successful only against less sophisticated forms of paternalism. His argument focuses too much on profound ethical convictions, failing to recognize the frequency with which people hold relatively unreflective convictions and the inevitable role of the law in helping to shape convictions. He makes concessions regarding paternalistic actions that come to be endorsed by the persons who are subject to them, but then tries to impose arbitrary limits on such endorsement. Finally, he rests his case against paternalism on the denial of transcendent standards, but is unable to avoid employing such standards himself. Building a case for certain forms of paternalism in a pluralistic liberal democracy is a difficult but necessary task, that can only proceed after removing fallacious objections like Dworkin's.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , Fall 1994 , pp. 615 - 640
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1994

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References

This article was originally presented as a paper at the 1991 American Public Philosophy Institute conference “Problems of Liberalism,” and benefited from the discussion of its participants. The author gratefully acknowledges the summer grant from the Bradley Institute for Democracy and Public Values at Marquette University which made preparation of this article possible.

1. I do not think that my argument is affected by anything that Dworkin, subsequently wrote in Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1993)Google Scholar, at least in part because in that book Dworkin presents his argument more as a dialectical analysis of others' views rather than as his own (though his own views eventually intrude). See Bradley, Gerard V. “Life's Dominion: A Review Essay” Notre Dame Law Review 69, no. 2 (1993): 329–91.Google ScholarPubMed

2. Public opinion polls notoriously fail to measure intensity much of the time, so that they often fail to capture the ambivalence of many members of the public on various questions.

3. Of course, Dworkin might allow for some government attempt to overcome racist thinking on the grounds that racists injure the rights of others. My argument here is the paternalistic one: that it might be desirable, in principle, for government to suppress racist thinking—or perhaps better, racist expressions—because the racists would be better off. (Whether government ought to do this involves other, prudential questions, of course.)

4. A fine discussion of the utility of law for establishing the conditions of a decent life is Clor's, HarryObscenity and Public Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), chap. 5.Google Scholar

5. Perhaps Dworkin would respond: since life is threatened, we can call this prohibition of unsafe ski-runs volitional paternalism, since we can assume skiers have a preference for enjoying skiing, and not ending life this way. But that simply returns us to the ambiguity of volitional paternalism. We could also say that those who are searching for the best way of life have a preference for a good way of life, and so they do not need to consider immoral ways of life.

6. It might be objected that, if Dworkin takes a rejection of a transcendent standard as a starting point, much of what I have said in response to his criticisms of paternalism so far is irrelevant, since it assumes the possibility of such a standard. But I do not think that Dworkin's rejection of a transcendent standard is his starting point. He does not begin by saying “we have no transcendent standard” and then show that “therefore we should not be patemalists.” The order of my argument here more or less follows Dworkin's own order, in which he starts out by describing different forms of paternalism and then subjects them to critical analysis. The rejection of a transcendent standard, then, is not an assumption from the start, but a factor that arises within his subsequent analysis and critique, especially the later treatment of conceptual paternalism.