Book Review

• Citation: (2011) 23 SAcLJ 682
• Date: 01 December 2011
• Author: CHOO Han Teck LLB (Hons) (National University of Singapore), LLM (Cambridge); Judge of the Republic of Singapore.
• Published date: 01 December 2011

Where is the song before it is sung?[1]

1“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”2 Whatever Archilocus might have meant by that statement no one knows. It was snatched by Isaiah Berlin for his essay on the broad distinction between two kinds of artists and intellectuals: “There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.”3 Berlin thus believed that the first kind of artistic and intellectual personality belongs to the hedgehogs and the second to the foxes. Foxes must have been breeding so rampantly that hedgehogs were feeling the breath of extinction settling on each and every one of their quills. Those who do not suffer from doubt expect that a definitive work will arrive, not only to restore the balance of nature, but to eradicate foxes from the philosophical terrain. Here it is: Justice for Hedgehogs (“JFH”). JFH is thus important and will be cheered or damned, depending, of course, on whether one is a fox or a hedgehog, but it is a book that deserves a serious and honest study of the thesis Dworkin advances, regardless of whether one roams more naturally in the ground or on it.

2 Dworkin does not defend his thesis that value in all its forms is indeed one big thing, in remote areas or in sporadic instances. He intended this to be exhaustive because the question of value emerges in

every philosophical subject - justice, liberty, law, politics, morality and truth. They are matters that have proved terribly resistant to any large, all-encompassing, and uniform consensus as to what they are and how they apply. G E Moore argued that such debates fail because they wrongly assumed that values are natural as facts and thus can be objectively proved.4 Similarly, one of Moore‘s distinguished predecessors, David Hume, expressed the view that all the objects of human reason or enquiry can be divided into two categories which he described as “relations to ideas” and “matters of fact”.5

3 Dworkin makes his case in the important metaphysical subjects in which value permeates our thinking about those subjects which he groups into three parts, namely, “Ethics”, “Morality” and “Politics” respectively in parts three, four, and five of the book. He draws a distinction between ethics and morality in a special way. He sees morality as defining the standards by which we treat others, and ethics as providing the standards by which we ought to live. On the face of it, the two overlap, but Dworkin explains that there may be conflicts between how we ought to live and how we ought to treat others. In the “Ethics” chapter, Dworkin discusses “Dignity” and “Free Will and Responsibility”. The Aristotelian idea of ethics and morality (used interchangeably unlike the Dworkinian approach) may not have taken moral luck into account since, by this view, it was not necessary to distinguish living well and having a good life. Dworkin introduces the conception of “dignity” in the...