Chapter Five Cracked Foundations of Liberal Equality*

Introduction Liberal egalitarianism is a variant of liberal political philosophy that emphasizes the obligation of society to enable its most poor and disadvantaged members to lead decent lives. Liberal egalitarianism fuses the traditional liberal theme of individual freedom and autonomy and a more radical theme of equal life prospects for all. Today the two foremost proponents of liberal egalitarianism are the philosophers John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. The writings of both men have given liberal egalitarianism a pronounced anti-utilitarian cast, epitomized in Rawls' slogan that the correct theory of justice must uphold " the priority of the right over the good. " 1 Perhaps surprisingly, in his essay 'Foundations of Liberal Equality' Dworkin partially reverses this priority, while making no concessions to utilitarianism, by undertaking to show that an individual who seeks a good life for herself and who conceives of the good life in terms of what Dworkin calls the " challenge model " would thereby have strong reasons to accept liberal egalitarian principles of justice. 2 In this way, according to Dworkin, ethics and political morality mutually reinforce one another – " ethics " being the theory of how to make one's life turn out best. This way of justifying principles of justice stands in marked contrast to the procedure of the " original position " that Rawls has made famous. Dworkin himself calls attention to this comparison. The idea of the original position is to model the choice of principles of justice as a choice of terms of social cooperation made by parties who are 2 stipulated to be ignorant of all particular facts about themselves, including facts about their conceptions of the good, and who are asked to advance their interests as best they can by choice of principles that are to regulate their common life. In other words, one is asked to put aside all one's beliefs about what is choice-worthy and worthwhile in human life when thinking about fair terms of social cooperation with other people who may differ with each other fundamentally about the good but are thought to share an interest in cooperating with others on fair terms. This strategy of isolating controversy about the good from agreement on what is fair invites the objection that if one assumes reasonable people will be utterly in conflict about the good life, it is just as reasonable to suppose that they will also be …