Law, Justice and the Unity of Value

Abstract

Ronald Dworkin’s new book, Justice for Hedgehogs, covers an extremely broad range of philosophical issues. However, its central thesis—the ‘unity of value thesis’—is that conflicts between moral or ethical values are merely apparent and that those values are, in fact, integrated and mutually supporting. Dworkin offers several arguments in support of this thesis, but, in this review, I focus on his attempt to illustrate the unity of value thesis by showing that the best account of certain key values reveals them to be integrated and mutually supporting. I contend that this strategy is more promising than one might initially think, but that it breaks down when we consider the relationship between law and justice. For Dworkin, law is a value and his account of law entails that it can conflict with justice. Moreover, he seems precluded from developing an alternative account of law that does not give rise to such conflicts. However, while these conclusions weaken Dworkin’s case for the unity of value thesis, they do not suffice to refute it.