A Brief Analysis on Ronald Dwo... free essay sample

A Brief Analysis on Ronald Dworkins Theory of RightsAccording to Ronald Dworkin, the fundamental distinction within political theory is between arguments of principle and arguments of policy. Arguments of principle are arguments intended to establish an individual right, while arguments of policy are arguments intended to establish a collective goal. (Regan, 1978) Under this hypothesis, Dworkin emphasized the significance of individual rights which was further developed a kind of precedence in his work Rights as Trumps: Rights are best understood as trumps over some background justification for political decisions that states a goal of the community as a whole. We will write a custom essay sample on A Brief Analysis on Ronald Dwo or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page (Dworkin, 1984, p. 153) This endowed individual rights with the priority to override the communitys goal because once an individuals gains a certain right, the behavior and individual liberty protected by the right should be defended even against the goals of the community or the state. Therefore, from Dworkins perspective, the government is forbidden to trade individual rights for well-being on a collective sense, which has been highly advocated by the Utilitarianism theories, such as Jeremy Benthams Greatest Happiness Principle that warns individual against pursing his own happiness that may lead to greater pain for a society as a whole.However, treating rights as trumps is a relatively dangerous argument. It is worth noticing that in a real card game, trump cards are discarded because of their unrivaled power that would contribute to the victory of the card user. In many occasions, the collective goal behind laws and public policies is to utilize natural, economic and political r esources while to minimize any harm that might be caused by abuse of individual rights. Therefore, when trump cards are remained in a card game, what will be impaired is the protection against harms by means of constitutional laws, criminal sanctions and regulations. This protection manages to prevent harm that would be imposed on any individual victim, or any social groups, or even the whole community. For instance, in the case Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, the Supreme Court of United States of America held that an ordinance passed in Hialeah, Florida, forbidding the unnecessary killing of an animal in a public or private ritual or ceremony not for the primary purpose of food consumption, was unconstitutional. (1993) In the conclusion part, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection. (1993) While protecting freedom of religion, this judgment may permit or even encourage deliberate animal killing under the name of religious errand or other noble causes, which could do harm to animals well-being.In Taking Rights Seriously, Dworkin created a famous metaphor of the timid lady on the streets of Chicago to demonstrate that members of a society only have a right to have enforced only those criminal laws that he would have a right to have enacted if they were not already law. (Dworkin, 1977) In other words, an individual rights only reside in those laws that allow him to participate in the process of legislation because he himself is directly involved in what those laws would prescribe. Laws against personal assault might be classified as this kind of law because those vulnerable members, as the minority, are in need of protection prescribed by law. However, in the Chicago ladys case, Dworkin refuted those rights that benefited society as a whole: The timid lady on the streets of Chicago is not entitled to just the degree of quiet that now obtains, nor is she entitled to have boys drafted to fight in wars she approves. There are laws—perhaps desirable laws—that provide these advantages for her, but the justification for these laws, if they can be justified at all, is the common desire of a large majority, not her personal right. If, therefore, these laws do abridge someone elses moral right to protest, or his right to personal security, she cannot urge a competing right to justify the abridgment. She has no personal right to have such laws passed, and she has no competing right to have them enforced either. (Dworkin, 1977)When Dworkin claimed that the collective goal of maintaining a safe community or a quiet street is not justified by individuals rights, this collective goal may symbolize the free will of the governed. With regard to Immanuel Kants rights theory, freedom of choice could be reflective of a generalized form of individual rights even though direct and substantial individual rights are not involved in collective actions. The reason is that any action is right if it can coexist with everyones freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyones freedom in accordance with a universal law. (Kant, 1991, p. 56) What is more, Dworkins demonstration of the timid Chicago ladys lack of individual rights in laws for collective interests is not logically sufficient for his conclusion that individual rights should override collective goals.When celebrating the superiority of individual rights, the collective goal of maintaining every citizens well-being would be under threat. In my opinion, the collective goal of making the community safer not only includes those relatively abstract public interests, such as protection against foreign invasion, but also more specific ones scattered in every aspect of our daily lives: protection from parental abuse, assurance of lowest living standards and basic education, elimination of pollution and public dise ases. They are more or less related to the personal life of every citizen: one may not be entitled to how safe streets in Chicago are, but when he is actually walking in it, his property and personal safety will be under threat if a group of street gangsters are waiting in the corner. In this situation, Dworkins idea not only depreciates the value of collective goal, but discourages individuals from using their free will to make personal judgments on public issues as well. As long as someone is not entitled to a certain thing, like a boy who is not drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, or a man who has never suffered from gender discrimination towards female, his preference for Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or Affirmative Action will not be based on his own rights, but his unjustified common desire as a member of the majority. This decreases the credibility of individuals words in public, and even may create moral discrimination towards those who have not directly participated in certain affairs.In Justice for Hedgehogs, Dworkin argued that when evaluating those principles guiding the collective life of a society, the criterion should be whether individual rights have been exercised thoroughly with enough freedom and protection, rather than the fulfillment of moral duties of legislators. (Dworkin, 2011, p. 209) The individuals rights, instead of duties of legislators, should act as the lighthouse in the development of law-making. When we come to political morality, rights plainly provide a better focus than duties because their location is more precise: individuals have political rights, and some of those rights, at least, are matched only by collective duties of community as a whole rather than of particular individuals. (Dworkin, 2011, p. 208)Compared to individuals rights, the duty of lawmakers might be a relatively clearer criterion for measuring advantages and disadvantages of legislation. On the theoretical level, lawmakers are not only empowered with the right to create laws, but also the duty to ensure that they are practicing this right responsibly. While abusing this right, namely acting out of the margin of constitutional restrictions is considered as inappropriate, dereliction could also be a form of injustice. To avoid infringing upon any kind of individual rights, lawmakers may remain a passive attitude and stop enacting laws that would improve collective well-being, leaving their citizens with complete individual rights but only private means to exercise them. However, only with the criterion that individual rights are maintained, one cannot identify whether legislatures are taking their responsibility correctly and fully or not.For Dworkin, the political principles behind law share the common characteri stics that require members of a society to collectively respect and protect individuals rights to decide for themselves the meaning of a good life. Any kind of collective coercion that sacrifices individuals idea of good life is not allowed, because government must not abridge total freedom when its putative justification relies on some collective decision about what makes a life good or well-lived. We must each make that decision for himself: that is the core of our ethical responsibility. (Dworkin, 2011, p. 232) However, this may create moral dilemmas: what if an individuals concept of good life collides with social norms and conventions? For instance, begging has always been a problematic issue for Springfield, a city in Illinois. There once lived President Abraham Lincoln whose heritages attract thousands of tourists to visit the town every year. Both panhandlers and business owners view the tourists as an unprecedented commercial opportunity. By 2007, says Victoria Ringer, head of Downtown Springfield, the begging problem was out of control. (Heppermann, 2014) Panhandlers may consider that a good life comes from begging $10 to buy a meal by asking tourists waiting to see Lincolns House, knocking on car windows while they were stopped at red lights, and interrupting people on restaurant patios. However, their behavior may impose negative influence on tourists experience in Springfield and may even lead to declining of the local tourism industry. In 2007, Springfield, Illinois passed an ordinance that outlaws panhandling in its downtown. If Dworkins good life theory is applied, this ordinance would be opposed by the panhandlers freedom of leading a good life which in fact impairs the interests of tourists and local tourism industry. Social problems caused by panhandlers are a reflection of the good life moral dilemma which would trouble not only legal scholars in theoretical reasoning, but judges and policy-makers in actual cases as well.One of the theoretical basis for Dworkins rights as trumps might be individualism that has been shaping American culture and nourishing the idea that individual rights are the priority of American society. Individualism supports the notion that interests of the individual should attain the same position as, or even achieve precedence over p ublic interests or interests of a certain social class, while opposing external interference upon ones own interests by society or institutions such as the government. (Briddle, 2012) When the conflict between individual rights and collective interests arises, Doctor Naskars advice is the one reflective of American characteristics: You must hiss at people who intend to undermine your individuality and its ensuing rights with their false pride of Collectivism and intellectual stupidity. You must frighten them away, lest they should do you harm. Act like you have a lot of venom inside you, but never inject them into anyone. (Naskar, 2016. p. 29) Therefore, exuberantly brandishing the value of ones individual rights and combating against collective interests creates a rhetorical image of the American hero: an individual audaciously striving out a path that other did not dare to try, a Ulysses standing with himself to confront the power of the government and institution that prohibits him from exercising his individual rights. At the same time, other individuals, communities, and even the state may fall victim to the harms caused by his gloriously outrageous behavior under the name of exercising individual rights. For instance, the protagonist of the movie Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri, Mildred Hayes, whose daughter was murdered after being raped, has been urging the local police station to capture the murder for years. During the process, Hayes broke the dentists fingernail with electric drills, and burned the local police station and Dixon who was reading a letter inside, causing great damage to individual victims and the police force as a whole. Even with a justified, or even gallant goal of finding out the criminal, Mildred, the American hero appreciated by the audience, did impose a hugely negative impact on collective interests.In conclusion, Dworkins rights as trumps theory may overemphasize the importance of rights while overlooking the harm-preventing function of collective goals. His argument that the criteria to evaluate principles guiding the collective life should be individual rights rather than moral duties of legislators may fail to notice legislatures dereliction and passiveness: lawmakers may choose to do nothing rather than to do too much. Similarly, when Dworkin claimed that individuals should have rights to decide for themselves the meaning of a good life, a series of moral dil emmas, such as whether panhandlers should have right to beg will emerge. One of the reason for Dworkins perception of rights might be individualism in American culture. In a society that is almost excessively wary of obstacles to individual liberty and personal rights, harms caused by abuse of rights are tend to be depreciated or even neglected. References1. Regan, D. H. (1978), Glosses on Dworkin: Rights, Principles, and Policies. Michigan Law Review.2. Dworkin, R. (1984). Rights as Trumps. In: Wasdrom, J. Theories of Rights. Oxford: University Press, 1984.3. Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 at 524 (1993).4. Dworkin, R. (1977). Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.5. Dworkin, R. (2011). Justice for Hedgehogs. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 6. Heppermann, A. (2014). The Right to Beg. Life of the Law, Vol. June, 2014.