The Online Library of Liberty

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• Literature of Liberty a Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought
• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Henry B. Veatch, Natural Law: Dead Or Alive?
• I: Natural Law
• “nature” and “law” In Natural Law
• The Anatomy of Natural Rights
• Egoism and Rights
• The Is/ought Chimera
• Deriving “ought” From “is”
• Facts Vs. Value-laden Whims
• Is/ought and Probable Reasons
• Does Righteous Anger Imply Rights?
• Why Be Moral?
• Truth As an Objective Value
• Was the Revolution Objectively Necessary?
• Natural Law and State of Nature
• Natural Law and the State
• Natural Rights and Anarchism
• Dworkin On Rights
• Liberalism, Rights, and Abortion
• Rights and “mercy Killing”
• Rights and the “brain Drain”
• The Natural Law Right to Work
• Grotius: Contract and Natural Law
• Rights and Communication
• II: Autonomy, Privacy, and Authority
• Bureaucracy and “the Organization Man”
• Autonomy and Anarchism
• Autonomy and Taking Responsibility
• Autonomy, Motivation, and “buck-passing”
• Schooling For Conformity
• The Schoolroom Vs. Autonomy
• Obedience to Authority
• The Meaning of Privacy
• Privacy and Autonomy
• Privacy and Consent
• The Court and Privacy
• III: The Ambiguities of Liberty
• Clarifying Freedom
• Rehabilitating Mill's “harm Principle”
• Experiencing Freedom
• Do Offers Coerce Freedom?
• The Danger of “dangerousness”
• Freedom, Motivation, and Government Programs
• Freedom Vs. Determinism
• Negative Vs. Positive Freedom
• Smith and Utilitarian Economic Freedom
• Locke, Freedom, and Tacit Consent
• Religious Freedom
• Freedom, Existentialism, and Innocent Victims
• Does Censorship Harm Freedom?
• IV: Slavery
• Slavery, Ideology, and Subordination
• Slavery and Imperialist Ideology
• Enlightenment Liberalism Vs. Slavery
• The Anatomy of a Slave Revolt
• Colonial American Slave Law
• Jefferson On Slavery
• Slavery and the Poor
• V: Planning
• Regulation and the Warfare State
• Mail, Privacy, and Social Control
• Corporate State Capitalism: Coal
• French War “planification”: Chlorates
• Bureaucracy and British Regulation
• British Foreign Policy and Stagnation
• Political Decisions and the Economy
• Government, Labor, and Multinationals
• Black Markets Vs. Regulation
• Regulation Vs. Academic Autonomy
• Government Schools and Social Control
• The Economics of Charity
• International State Planning and Inflation
• Competition and Individual Knowledge

Dworkin on Rights

Joseph Raz

• Balliol College, Oxford

“Professor Dworkin's Theory and Rights.” Political Studies (UK), 26 (1978): 123–137.

Ronald Dworkin makes rights the heart of his legal and political theories. His concept elevates individual political rights over collective social goals.

However, Dworkin fails to identify the definitive characteristics of rights. He is correct in saying that rights ought to be respected, that they belong to “rightholders,” and that the right-holders' objects may be thought of as morally good. But these three properties of rights are radically incomplete.

Dworkin's views on the foundations of political theory have changed greatly over the years. In Taking Rights Seriously (1972) he regarded fundamental rights as generally superior to collective goals, and as requiring very weighty considerations to override them. In his later writings, Dworkin dismisses any possible conflict between collective welfare (understood as a function of the personal preferences of individuals only) and rights. The legitimacy of collective welfare as a political goal derives from the ambiguous right to be treated as an equal, which in Dworkin's view is the fundamental right.

What is the right to be treated as an equal? It is not, claims Dworkin, a right to have an equal share of all resources or benefits. Dworkin's right to be treated with equal concern and respect does not identify him as an egalitarian ideologist. This right to equal treatment implies that government ought to strive to satisfy every personal preference and that government must never act on controversial ideals.

Dworkin fails to make a persuasive case for his view on the foundations of political theory. His vagueness on the right to concern and respect does not permit us to judge whether it encompasses all the values that should inform political action.

In his legal philosophy, Dworkin is the most powerful theorist of law yet to emerge from the United States. Dworkin's seminal article on “Hard Cases” expounds his theory of law and examines three theses: (1) The Natural Law Thesis: what law is depends logically on what is moral. (2) The Conservative Thesis: all judicial decisions should be justified by the political theory which best justified by the political theory which best justifies all valid and binding decisions. (3) The Rights Thesis: judicial decisions are and should be based on existing legal rights only.

Dworkin's Rights Thesis is the only one of these three which he identifies under his own name. Despite appearances, it does not exclude a judge's reliance on social and economic considerations, since these are themselves defined as rights. Further, the economic and social considerations by which Dworkin expands the notion of rights are all legal rights. Dworkin's Natural Law Thesis allows morally binding considerations to be legally binding. The Rights Thesis (given Dworkin's definition of rights) is, in fact, devoid of content.

Although Dworkin's major theses fail, Raz stresses that we can learn much from Dworkin's legal philosophy.