The Dignity of Rights

Abstract

Jeremy Waldron's latest book, Law and Disagreement, shows, once again, that he is one of those theorists of rights who can wear several hats at the same time, those of a moral, political, and legal philosopher. Yet, Waldron's contribution to legal and political philosophy, as evidenced by this book, sets him apart from distinguished figures such as Joseph Raz and Ronald Dworkin. For although he agrees that rights are a fundamental ideal in political and legal discourse and has, indeed, spent most of his academic career analysing them with relentless intensity, he is very wary of any fetishistic attempt to constitutionalize them and thereby to remove them from the political fray. Law and Disagreement's central, and original, claim is that the existence, and persistence, of moral disagreements should constitute the starting point of any jurisprudential inquiry into the nature of law and of its authority. In the face of such disagreements, fundamental moral issues, and in particular issues concerning rights, should not be dealt with by judges; they should be addressed by legislators according to democratic pro cedures, for only laws thus enacted have authority. Thus, Waldron is concerned not with what he calls the first task of political philosophy, to wit, the task of delineating a conception of rights and justice, but with the second task, to wit, the task of defending the best principles for choosing between competing such conceptions. All of the book's 13 chapters, bar the introductory one, first appeared as articles in various publications; they have been substantially rewritten for the purpose of this volume which, as a result, looks like a book rather than a collection of essays. They are organized into three parts. The first deals with the 'jurisprudence of legislation', and sheds light on the importance of institutional facts about legislatures for legislative practice and the authority of laws. The second part analyses the idea of disagreement in politics, via a study of John Rawls' Political Liberalism and Ronald Dworkin's Lawv Empire, and a chapter on moral objectivity. The last part, for which the first two