Ronald Dworkin Quotes

Absolute confidence or clarity is the privilege of fools and fanatics.

I disagree with you, but I recognize the integrity of your argument. I recognize your moral responsibility.

Death has dominion because it is not only the start of nothing but the end of everything, and how we think and talk about dying - the emphasis we put on dying with 'dignity' - shows how important it is that life ends appropriately, that death keeps faith with the way we have lived it.

Cultures have tried to teach a malign and apparently persuasive lie: that the most important metric of a good life is wealth and the luxury and power it brings. The rich think they live better when they are even richer. In America and many other places they use their wealth politically, to persuade the public to elect or accept leaders who will do that for them. They say that the justice we have imagined is socialism that threatens our freedom. Not everyone is gullible: many people lead contented lives without wealth. But many others are persuaded; they vote for low taxes to keep the jackpot full in case they too can win it, even though that is a lottery they are almost bound to lose. Nothing better illustrates the tragedy of an unexamined life: there are no winners in this macabre dance of greed and delusion. No respectable or even intelligible theory of value supposes that making and spending money has any value or importance in itself and almost everything people buy with that money lacks any importance as well. The ridiculous dream of a princely life is kept alive by ethical sleepwalkers. And they in turn keep injustice alive because their self-contempt breeds a politics of contempt for others. Dignity is indivisible.

The auction proposes what the envy test in fact assumes, that the true measure of the social resources devoted to the life of one person is fixed by asking how important, in fact, that resource is for others. [The auction] insists that the cost, measured in that way, figures in each person's sense of what is rightly his and in each person's judgment of what life he should lead, given that command of justice.

The tension between religion and science is an old problem. In the fourth century, Christians and scientists were deadlocked over the matter of the earth's shape. Saint Augustine, a wise man who knew the difference between the outer life and the inner life, wrote: 'What concern is it of mine whether heaven is like a sphere and the earth is enclosed by it and suspended in the middle of the universe, or whether heaven like a disk above the earth covers it over on one side? These facts would be of no avail for my salvation.' Augustine attached little importance to science and left it alone. If a reading of the Bible conflicted with a scientific view that was certain truth, he humbly admitted that he had interpreted the Bible erroneously. He could afford to be humble, for in his inmost convictions he looked upon science the way a master looks upon his pet, as a creature with intelligence but lacking in higher understanding, and something irrelevant to the search for meaning in life.

Interpret the new situation in the best light.

Philosophers used to speculate about what they called the meaning of life. (That is now the job of mystics and comedians.)

Integrity is the key to understanding legal practice. Law's empire is defined by attitude, not territory or power or process.

Ronald Dworkin has recently argued that the central doctrine of modern liberalism is the thesis that questions about the good life for man or the ends of human life are to be regarded from the public standpoint as systematically unsettlable. On these individuals are free to agree or to disagree. The rules of morality and law hence are not to be derived from or justified in terms of some more fundamental conception of the good for man.

I respect the values that imbued my personal trajectory, I must avoid the degradations and dependencies of pointless suffering. “Death has dominion,” Ronald Dworkin explains, “because it is not only the start of nothing but the end of everything, and how we think and talk about dying—the emphasis we put on dying with ‘dignity’—shows how important it is that life ends appropriately, that death keeps faith with the way we want to have lived.

Does meaning matter? Philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s cheap dismissal is often quoted, “Philosophers used to speculate about what they called the meaning of life. (That is now the job of mystics and comedians.)”2 But that of course is too cynical. “Man cannot stand a meaningless life,” Carl Gustav Jung claimed.3 Anthropologist Clifford Geertz agreed. “The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more biological needs.”4 But if meaning is so important, what accounts for the striking carelessness in pursuing it?

Ronald Dworkin