The holes in holism
| Author | Charles Larmore |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885113477055 |
| Published date | 01 April 2013 |
| Date | 01 April 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Review articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
12(2) 205–216
!The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885113477055
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Review article
The holes in holism
Charles Larmore
Brown University, USA
Ronald Dworkin Justice for Hedgehogs. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
2011
Introduction
This book is Ronald Dworkin’s most ambitious work, far more ambitious than its
title suggests. One might suppose that it deals essentially with justice, inferring from
the allusion to Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, that its
principal aim is to offer a grand theory of this subject. Berlin, it will be remembered,
used Archilochus’ line, ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big
thing’, to contrast two different intellectual attitudes toward the world: the fox, like
Berlin himself, recognizes that life gives rise to many diverse and sometimes con-
flicting ends, which have to be balanced or held together in an uneasy truce, whereas
the hedgehog believes that all our proper ends find their place in a single, overarching
system. Dworkin is certainly a hedgehog in this sense. However, the unitary vision he
develops in this book embraces much more than the nature of justice. His ambition is
to tie together into one comprehensive theory all the different domains of value –
both ethics, or how we ourselves are to live well, and personal morality, or how we as
individuals are to treat others, no less than political morality, which concerns how we
are to treat others, justly for instance, as members of a political community. Even the
nature of interpretation, as practiced in history, law, and literary criticism, is
included, because of its dependence on values. ‘Value’, Dworkin announces at the
beginning of the book, ‘is one big thing’ (p. 1). Justice for Hedgehogs is not primarily
a book about justice, even if justice is its ultimate target.
So capacious is the theory Dworkin presents that the entire first half of the book
is devoted to laying out, as an integral part of the more substantive discussions to
follow, an account of the nature of value judgments in general and of what it means
for them to be true or false. Generally, philosophers distinguish such ‘meta-ethical’
or second-order questions about ethics and morals from the first-order questions of
ethics and morals that concern what things are in fact good and bad, right and
wrong, and they often suppose that these two sorts of questions can be addressed
Corresponding author:
Charles Larmore, Department of Philosophy,Brown University, 75 Waterman St., Providence, RI 02906, USA.
Email: Charles_Larmore@brown.edu
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