Dworkin on Disagreement

This paper examines the work of Ronald Dworkin on the subject of legal and political disagreement and interrogates the charge that he does not take disagreement seriously. The paper defines the idea of ‘taking disagreement seriously’ in terms of the ideal of respect, and particularly respect for the liberty and equality, between the members of a political community in a conventionally liberal sense. It identifies the basis of the charge that he does not take disagreement seriously in his general thesis of the unity of value and in particular in three archetypes of his work which express this more general idea – the right-answer-in-law thesis, the no-value-conflicts thesis, and the moral objectivity thesis. Through a focus on his interpretive method, the paper makes two claims against this charge: the first is that the critical, iterative and justificatory nature of this interpretive method, combined with his broader ‘responsibility project’, show that Dworkin’s legal and political theory takes the respect necessary for the normative relevance of political disagreement very seriously; the second is that the way in which Dworkin emphasises the agreement necessary for disagreement makes an important contribution to our understanding of political legitimacy more generally. The paper concludes that Dworkin’s emphasis on communities of principle in political disagreement is particularly important in the context of political populism in that it helps us better understand the problems with certain strains of political populism from the viewpoint of liberal democratic values.