Equality is the endangered species of political ideals. Even
left-of-center politicians reject equality as an ideal: government
must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its
citizens be equal in any dimension. In his new book Ronald Dworkin
insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue
of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all
its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern,
and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is
mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that
requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that
distribution.
What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal
concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist
principles--first, it is of equal objective importance that all
human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for
defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life--to
ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in
the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the
success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual
responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and
into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life
and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood
except in the context of actual and complex political issues,
Dworkin develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary
controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment
benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted
suicide, and genetic engineering.
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