드워킨의 정치적 신념: 자유, 평등 그리고 생명의 사이

Abstract

This article attempts at politically classifying Dworkin. One's political orientation is often best shown through his or her attitude toward the relationship between liberty and equality. Indeed, Dworkin's such attitude is best shown in his ambitious proposal for the ultimate political morality that each state must be based upon, which dictates that the state should (1) treat all people with equal concern and (2) guarantee that each one's fate is determined by his or her choice alone. These two principles materialize in the radical principle of ‘equality of resources’ whereby everyone is distributed equal resources which are subject to redistribution for all factors other than the person's choices, including personal abilities,and once redistributed, everyone is responsible for all the consequences of his or her use of the resources. However, these principles, when applied to pornography and affirmative action, do not produce binding results. Dworkin's stance on pornography depends on empirical analysis on whether fictions depicting women negatively chill women's actions, and his stance on affirmative action requires a finding on whether people make decisions based on kinship. More generally, the tension between the political left and the political right originates more from such concrete understanding of man whereby the Left insist on a more compassionate understanding of man where even equality of results is sometimes required while the Right insist on an atomistic, self-reliant understanding of man. Dworkin's liberal principle does not correlate to or resolve that dispute. This is actually expected because Dworkin is known more for the Herculean, inductive reasoning than the deductive reasoning. By trying to derive the concrete from the universal, Dworkin has given up drawing from the richest source of his usual legal reasoning: positive law. The author suspects that Dworkin's failure to reconcile liberty and equality originates from the fact that his ostensibly liberal principles are actually based on substantively objective value of life. Confirming that suspicion through speculation will be the topic for another research project.