Though today may be Groundhog Day, we’ve got hedgehogs on the brain. That’s on account of our recent publication of Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs. As Dworkin explains in the video below, produced by the NYU School of Law, the book’s title comes from the aphorism that, while the fox may know many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing.
For Dworkin, the hedgehog’s take on justice is a theory of value by which truth, ethics, and morality are all interconnected. “Value is one big thing,” he explains in the book. “The truth about living well and being good and what is wonderful is not only coherent but mutually supporting: what we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest.”
Justice for Hedgehogs is one big book about one big thing, and it’s meant to stand alone. Indeed, though this new work clearly enters conversations shaped by thinkers from Socrates to Rawls to Sen, Dworkin minimizes direct engagement because, as he states in the preface, “this is not a book about what other people think.” What Dworkin himself thinks, though, is significant enough to have inspired a two-day conference at Boston University just prior to the book’s publication. The papers from that conference were collected in a special issue of the BU Law Review that can be accessed here.
Dworkin writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the current issue of which features an essay adapted from Justice for Hedgehogs. In the essay, titled “What Is a Good Life?”, he presents the book’s argument for a unifying theory of value and brings it to bear on personal conduct. An excerpt follows, and the whole piece is available online:
We have a responsibility to live well, and the importance of living well accounts for the value of having a critically good life. These are no doubt controversial ethical judgments. I also make controversial ethical judgments in any view I take about which lives are good or well-lived. In my own view, someone who leads a boring, conventional life without close friendships or challenges or achievements, marking time to his grave, has not had a good life, even if he thinks he has and even if he has thoroughly enjoyed the life he has had. If you agree, we cannot explain why he should regret this simply by calling attention to pleasures missed: there may have been no pleasures missed, and in any case there is nothing to miss now. We must suppose that he has failed at something: failed in his responsibilities for living.
Finally, though we share Dworkin’s amusement at the prospect of the book being mistaken for animal rights advocacy, we can’t resist sharing a bit of art that plays on the book’s title. It’s by a former colleague of ours who left HUP behind for greener pastures and greater passions, and you can see it here.
