Dworkin and Permissions

MARTÍ, JOSÉ LUIS; SELEME, HUGO OMAR

Barcelona

Simposio; Symposium Ronald Dworkin; 2011

In Justice for Hedgehogs Professor Ronald Dworkin advances different arguments against a view he calls external skepticism about morality. We share with him the belief that such position is flawed but have doubts about some of the reasons he provides for this conclusion. We will not have time to develop here our own explanation of the weaknesses of moral skepticism. What we will try to show, in this brief comment, is that Professor Dworkin’s arguments against it are, at best, incomplete, and maybe, at worst, misguided. The reason of this has to do with his employment of an insufficiently fine-grained conception of a moral permission, or so we will argue. We do not want to present our position, though, as a fundamental criticism of Dworkin’s overall position. We think it rather as a cooperative attempt to strengthen his line of argument against skepticism, in order to which, we must play the devil’s advocate here.