Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality

Rating:
Summary: A Theory - And a Theory Only
Review: I have for some time trying to find a good book speaking the liberal cause, as the few books I have read in this area were full of rhetoric while scant in logic - this in comparison with many serious thinkers and writers in the libertarian and conservative bent. I had high hopes on this book.

Professor Dworkin is no doubt a serious thinker and a very good writer. However, I am disappointed in his book. His theory in equality is well written but not well reasoned. It seems that the professor lives and thinks in the rarefied theoretical world, but tries to develop a theory that he hopes to put into practice for the real world.

Economists and demographists talk about a distribution as a manifested result of spontaneous transactions, such as the distribution income for a particular year. The professor's starting premises has to do with a notion of distribution of resources as an action, or the direct result of policies, by some dictating authority (the government). Although Dworkin tries not to make it sound like his views are socialistic, they in fact are.

Professor Dworkin takes great care to define his preferred notion equality to be distributional equality of resources. This immediately raises many problems: Who grants the control of resources? Where do these resources that are to be granted come from? Who decides what is a fair (equal) share, given the different needs of different people? What happens over time, when individual actions and choices create new inequalities? The professor is aware of these problems and theorizes on them. But no reasonable answers can be developed, except in small and/or theoretical cases such as a father in a position to will his assets to his off-springs, or what happens after a shipwreck on a desert island.

I did not finish reading the entire book - I could not justify spending time to continue after I concluded that foundation of his theory, as well as much of his "theorized practice" were so wholly academic that they placed serious limits on the usefulness of the theory itself. Anyway, in all fairness, you should give more weight to those who have read the entire book.

For those who seriously ponder on the related issue of equality, fairness and justice, I would highly recommend "The Quest for Cosmic Justice" by Thomas Sowell. You will be spared the tedious academic theorizing and get a lucid, well-reasoned dissertation on the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Impossibly Interesting
Review: If you're willing to expend the energy on Dworkin's dense, abstract prose in the first section, you'll be rewarded in the second section wherein he applies his abstractions to tough issues like national healthcare, and genetic manipulation. Dworkin sometimes sounds like an insurance analyst -- he tends to think in terms of spreading risk across populations. He also likes to build models to help conceptualize the distribution of risk and reward in society. These models, fully understood, provide a means of gauging all kinds of propositions: propositions about genetic experimentation, economic inequality, healthcare, to name just a few that he covers in the second section. The problem is that it takes a long time for Dworkin to set up these models that one begins to lose sight of just why such a conceptual tool might be worthwhile (for instance, a desert island where everyone arrives on an equal footing and the auction that ensues to distribute resources equally according to preference.) At the same time, there is something heartening about Dworkin's insistence that rationality can prevail, that reasonable people can agree on certain basic assumptions about the importance of public goods and ways in which these goods might be attained. One wants to believe that this is the case, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary, especially in our current political discourse, so polarized as not to admit any room for the intrusion of reason. A noble try, really. Overall, a tough book, but a rewarding one.

Rating:
Summary: Lazy Scholarship
Review: Ron Dworkin doesn't work through his views very well if this book is characteristic of his thinking. In the first few chapters, he builds an imaginary world in which the government confiscates (read taxation)all resources in the nation and auctions them off evenly among the population. But auctions are just the beginning of his idealistic approach to political philosophy.

True, this portion of the book is theory, but his theories are fantasies. They're not realistic at all.

The second half of the book is his attempt to put into practice the idealistic proposals in the first half.

I found this book good as a text if you want to teach a class on contemporary political philosophy, but only if you are looking to get your students thinking about a large number of current issues and improve their critical thinking skills. If you're trying to give them examples of how to think or give a good representation of solid liberal political thought, I would pass this one by.

Let me give an example of Dworkin's bias and poor research. In Chapter 11, "Affirmative Action, Does It Work?", Dworkin's answer is a profound "YES!!" But to support his view, he uses one study and one study alone, Bowen and Bok's "The Shape of the River." He only mentions "American in Black and White" which, by the way, destroys his argument. The River study looks only at a very narrow sample, blacks in elite educational institutions. As a friend and fellow student said, "If I were to write chapter 11 as a term paper, it would have been returned to me with an extremely low grade or a request to support my view with more research." The reader gets the idea that either Dworkin couldn't find any other material which supported his view, or he was just lazy in looking. Which brings up another interesting facet of this book. It seems Dworkin came to the table with views and looked for materials to support those views. He does not come across as open and objective at all.

Sovereign Virtue gives the impression Dworkin may have sat down and knocked this out in a weekend or two without any peer review. If you're interested in philosophy, especially liberal democratic political philosophy, look elsewhere. Al Franken might even be a better choice, but less of a joke.

Rating:
Summary: Lazy Scholarship
Review: Ron Dworkin doesn't work through his views very well if this book is characteristic of his thinking. In the first few chapters, he builds an imaginary world in which the government confiscates (read taxation)all resources in the nation and auctions them off evenly among the population. But auctions are just the beginning of his idealistic approach to political philosophy.

True, this portion of the book is theory, but his theories are fantasies. They're not realistic at all.

The second half of the book is his attempt to put into practice the idealistic proposals in the first half.

I found this book good as a text if you want to teach a class on contemporary political philosophy, but only if you are looking to get your students thinking about a large number of current issues and improve their critical thinking skills. If you're trying to give them examples of how to think or give a good representation of solid liberal political thought, I would pass this one by.

Let me give an example of Dworkin's bias and poor research. In Chapter 11, "Affirmative Action, Does It Work?", Dworkin's answer is a profound "YES!!" But to support his view, he uses one study and one study alone, Bowen and Bok's "The Shape of the River." He only mentions "American in Black and White" which, by the way, destroys his argument. The River study looks only at a very narrow sample, blacks in elite educational institutions. As a friend and fellow student said, "If I were to write chapter 11 as a term paper, it would have been returned to me with an extremely low grade or a request to support my view with more research." The reader gets the idea that either Dworkin couldn't find any other material which supported his view, or he was just lazy in looking. Which brings up another interesting facet of this book. It seems Dworkin came to the table with views and looked for materials to support those views. He does not come across as open and objective at all.

Sovereign Virtue gives the impression Dworkin may have sat down and knocked this out in a weekend or two without any peer review. If you're interested in philosophy, especially liberal democratic political philosophy, look elsewhere. Al Franken might even be a better choice, but less of a joke.

Rating:
Summary: an ingenious argument for a subtle conception of liberal equ
Review: With Sovereign Virtue, Ronald Dworkin finally presents his political theory in a form convenient for the general reader, stripped of the specialized arguments about jurisprudence on which he has built his reputation. The issue in Sovereign Virtue is not how judges should decide cases, but what kind of equality between individuals government should secure and maintain. For Dworkin, liberal egalitarianism strives to make the effects of personal choice dominate over those of individual luck. "When and how far is it right that individuals bear disadvantages or misfortunes of their own situations themselves, and when is it right, on the contrary, that others-the other members of the community in which they live, for example-relieve them from or mitigate the consequences of these disadvantages?" (p. 287). His answer is that "individuals should be relieved of consequential responsibility for those unfortunate features of their situation that are brute bad luck, but not from those that should be seen as flowing from their own choices" (p. 287). In this way, Dworkin claims to strike the right balance between collective and personal responsibility...

...if one makes it past the many pedantic issues Dworkin raises, one will finally come to the provocative, practical nub of his political theory: the distinction between fair and unfair differences in wealth. All philosopher's puzzles aside, Sovereign Virtue calls for a continuous redistribution of wealth much more massive than what is effected now. Dworkin gives no concrete figures, but he believes that "the wealth of everyone in a fair society would be much closer to the average than is true in America now: the great extremes between rich and poor that mark our economic life now would have largely disappeared" (p. 312). Only such a very large redistribution, he contends, would render persons tolerably equal in the extent to which their fates are determined by things beyond their control, but would also leave each person's fate sensitive to the choices he actually makes. Dworkin also argues for a universal health-care system, a more generous welfare scheme, greater regulations on campaign expenditures and contributions, and race-sensitive admissions policies. But all of these positions, with the possible exception of the last, issue directly from the fundamental inequity Dworkin sees in the free-market distribution of wealth...

...Are the advantages accruing to lucky owners of "wealth-talent" any different in principle from the advantages conferred by very selective universities to the lucky owners of the endowment of being black? As F. A. Hayek once noted, the free market does not recognize merit or desert in any objective sense, but simply the value others place on one's capacities or services. "Our problem is whether it is desirable that people should enjoy advantages in proportion to the benefits which their fellows derive from their activities or whether the distribution of these advantages should be based on other men's views of their merits" (Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960], p. 94). But this problem is exactly the same as the one regarding university admissions, as Dworkin frames it...

...Sovereign Virtue, in general, contains an ingenious argument for a subtle conception of liberal equality, worked out over the course of a prodigious career. There are many impressive parts to Dworkin's argument that I have not mentioned for lack of space. Still, that argument is marked by several fundamental inconsistencies. Why should certain people enjoy the unmerited privilege of a rare and prestigious university education, but no one enjoy unmerited wealth? Why shouldn't entrepreneurial capitalists enjoy the equal benefit of Dworkin's liberal neutrality toward "life plans"? And why should inequalities of political influence receive more lax treatment under Dworkin's egalitarian principle than inequalities of wealth? Until Dworkin explains how these positions issue from consistent principle, we must consider his political theory a work of extraordinarily articulate prejudice.