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Against Dworkin's Endorsement Constraint

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

T. M. Wilkinson
T. M. Wilkinson
Affiliation:
University of Auckland, [email protected]
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Abstract

Ronald Dworkin argues on the basis of a theory of well-being that critical paternalism is self-defeating. People must endorse their lives if they are to benefit. This is the endorsement constraint and this paper rejects it. For certain kinds of important mistakes that people can make in their lives, the endorsement constraint is either incredible or too narrow to rule out as much paternalism as Dworkin wants. The endorsement constraint cannot be interpreted to give sensible judgements when people change their minds about the value of their lives. And the main argument for the endorsement constraint, which is based on the value of integrity, does not support Dworkin's anti-paternalism.

Type
Articles
Information
Utilitas , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , July 2003 , pp. 175 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2003

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References

1 The major liberal writers have not been sceptics about the good life, however the liberal tradition has been misrepresented by many critics. For accounts of both the non-scepticism and the misrepresentation, see Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community, and Culture Oxford, 1989Google Scholar, ch. 2 or Holmes, Stephen, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, Cambridge, MA, 1993, esp. ch. 15Google Scholar.

2 In various different ways, the following roughly favour the view that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition of something's contributing to a person's well-being that the person want it or takes pleasure in it: Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons Oxford, 1984Google Scholar, app. I; Griffin, James, Well-Being Oxford, 1986, chs. 1 f.Google Scholar; Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom Oxford, 1986, ch. 12Google Scholar; Sumner, Wayne, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, Oxford, 1996, ch. 6Google Scholar.

3 Joseph Raz is one example, but his view is sufficiently complex to deserve a paper on its own; and anyway a main plank of his liberalism is not his view of well-being generally but the value of autonomy as a culturally specific requirement of well-being. See The Morality of Freedom, ch. 14. Will Kymlicka is another example. His view is that lives have to be led from the inside and that consequently coercion would be self-defeating. He also takes this view to be common to liberals. See e.g. Liberalism, Community, and Culture, ch. 2.

4 The texts used for Dworkin's, views about paternalism, endorsement, and well-being are his Sovereign Virtue, Cambridge, MA, 2000Google Scholar, which reprints material from ‘Foundations of Liberal Equality’, Equal Freedom ed. Stephen Darwall, Ann Arbor, 1995, and his Life's Dominion London, 1993Google Scholar.

5 Dworkin, , Sovereign Virtue, pp. 242–5Google Scholar.

6 Dworkin intends his arguments to apply to perfectionist compulsion too, in so far as it can be distinguished from paternalism.

7 Dworkin, , Sovereign Virtue, p. 268Google Scholar.

8 The distinction between volitional and critical paternalism is similar to the well-known distinction between soft and hard paternalism. See Feinberg, Joel, Harm to Self, New York, 1986, pp. 12–16Google Scholar.

9 Dworkin, , Sovereign Virtue, pp. 271 fGoogle Scholar.

10 See ibid., pp. 248 f;, 267–74, 283. For a critical exposition of Dworkin's view and the difference between these various claims, see my ‘Dworkin on Paternalism and Well-Being’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, xvi (1996)Google Scholar. Arneson, Richard has criticized Dworkin's endorsement constraint in ‘Liberal Democratic Community’, Democratic Community: Nomos XXXV ed. Chapman, John W. and Shapiro, Ian, New York, 1993Google Scholar, and ‘Human Flourishing Versus Desire Satisfaction’, Social Philosophy and Policy, xvi (1999)Google Scholar.

11 The relation between coercion and belief is actually rather more complicated than the text implies, but in ways that do not make a difference here. For some of the complexity, see Brown, Peter, Augustine of Hippo, London, 1967, p. 233Google Scholar on ‘disciplina’. I am grateful to Andrew Sharp for this reference.

12 I have been helped in drawing up this list by Sen's, Amartya distinction between basic and non-basic judgements, from his Collective Choice and Social Welfare San Francisco, 1970, pp. 59–65Google Scholar, and by G. A. Cohen's discussion and development of the distinction, in his ‘Facts and Principles’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, forthcoming.

13 Dworkin, , Sovereign Virtue, p. 270Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., p. 269. I have inserted the ‘not’ to make sense of this passage. See also p. 274.

15 The condition might be responsiveness to reasons. Sher, George (Beyond Neutrality Cambridge, 1997, pp. 63–5)CrossRefGoogle Scholar uses this condition to develop a later-endorsement reply to autonomy arguments against perfectionism. Sumner agrees that genuine endorsement can occur after non-autonomous indoctrination. For him, the tainted historical origins of endorsement need not rule out its authenticity. See Sumner, p. 170.

16 There is a parallel here with the question of whether satisfying past desires makes someone's life go better. The following are just some who think it does not: Brandt, Richard, A Theory of the Good and the Right Oxford, 1979, ch. 13Google Scholar; Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, ch. 7, esp. p. 157Google Scholar; Scanlon, Thomas, ‘Value, Desire, and the Quality of Life’, The Quality of Life, ed. Nussbaum, M. and Sen, A., Oxford, 1993, pp. 192 fGoogle Scholar.

17 Richard Arneson, in his earlier incarnation as a staunch subjectivist about welfare, provides this example in an attempt to show that satisfying past desires can make lives go better. See ‘Liberalism, Distributive Subjectivism, and Equal Opportunity for Welfare’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, xix (1989), pp. 164–7Google Scholar. Arneson does not there distinguish sharply having reasons and promoting well-being.

18 Dworkin, Ronald, Life's Dominion, pp. 220 f, 226, 231 fGoogle Scholar.

19 Something for which he is roundly criticized in Jaworska's, Agnieszka article ‘Respecting the Margins of Agency: Alzheimer's Patients and the Capacity to Value’, Philosophy and Public Affairs xxviii (1999)Google Scholar, sect. 2.

20 Derek Parfit gives the example of poets whose critical judgement of their own work gets worse over time. See Reasons and Persons, p. 155.

21 Dworkin has other arguments besides integrity and these are criticized in Wilkinson, 438–41. As for the integrity argument, that article claims that Dworkin gave too much weight to integrity but here I argue that integrity does not even support his anti-paternalism.

22 Dworkin, , Sovereign Virtue, pp. 271 fGoogle Scholar.

23 The relevant (and few) pages on integrity are Sovereign Virtue, pp. 270–2, and Life's Dominion, pp. 205 f., 224–9. Elsewhere, Dworkin makes a good deal of integrity in a jurisprudential theory of adjudication, but that is not relevant to the endorsement constraint. See Law's Empire, London, 1986, esp. ch. 6Google Scholar.

24 Dworkin, , Life's Dominion, p. 205Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

25 These claims about the ordinary use of integrity are also made in the philosophical literature, which does not treat integrity as something that can be directly compromised by third party actions. See e.g. Taylor, Gabriele, ‘Integrity’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. lv (1981)Google Scholar and Calhoun, Cheshire ‘Standing for Something’, Journal of Philosophy xcii (1995)Google Scholar.

26 Dworkin, , Life's Dominion, p. 205Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., esp. pp. 208–13.

28 Ibid., pp. 226–8. Dworkin believes that the man's right of autonomy requires that he should get the transfusion he asks for. Given the way Dworkin characterizes the right of autonomy as the right to choose, that is obviously true, but the case illustrates the weakness in Dworkin's argument from integrity to autonomy. Be that as it may, it is critical interests we are considering here, and the Witness is choosing against those.

29 This is the conclusion of ch. 7 in ibid. See p. 213.

30 Michael Slote thinks it important in itself to have one's achievements in one's prime of life. See his Goods and Virtues, Oxford, 1983, ch. 1Google Scholar. David Velleman shares some of Slote's intuitions, but thinks the explanation lies in the importance of a narrative structure. See his ‘Well-Being and Time’, The Metaphysics of Death, ed.Fischer, John Martin, Stanford, 1993Google Scholar. Scanlon denies that these authors' idea of overall well-being has the importance they believe. What is important to people, he argues, are their goals, not these abstract ideals of their ordering. See What We Owe to Each Other Cambridge, MA, 1998, pp. 132 fGoogle Scholar.

31 My thanks to Joseph Chan, Jiwei Ci, Andrew Moore, Debbie Tseung, and an audience at Hong Kong University.