Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality.

• Author: CHOI, DANIEL
• Position: Review

* Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality By Ronald Dworkin Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. 505. $35.00 cloth.

With Sovereign Virtue, Ronald Dworkin finally presents his political theory in a form convenient for the general reader, stripped of the specialized arguments about jurisprudence on which he has built his reputation. The issue in Sovereign Virtue is not how judges should decide cases, but what kind of equality between individuals government should secure and maintain. For Dworkin, liberal egalitarianism strives to make the effects of personal choice dominate over those of individual luck. "When and how far is it right that individuals bear disadvantages or misfortunes of their own situations themselves, and when is it right, on the contrary, that others--the other members of the community in which they live, for example--relieve them from or mitigate the consequences of these disadvantages?" (p. 287). His answer is that "individuals should be relieved of consequential responsibility for those unfortunate features of their situation that are brute bad luck, but not from those that should be seen as flowing from their own choices" (p. 287). In this way, Dworkin claims to strike the right balance between collective and personal responsibility.

Something must be said first about Dworkin's style. It is stolidly, sometimes maddeningly academic. It takes him fifty-three pages of intricate reasoning, for instance, to conclude that having government maintain an "equality of welfare" between individuals is not "so coherent or attractive an ideal as it is often taken to be" (p. 62). Should government ensure that each person is equally successful in fulfilling his preferences about his own life and circumstances? After four unnecessary pages, Dworkin concludes "no." Should government ensure that each person feels equally successful in leading a valuable life? We must wait ten pages for Dworkin to arrive at the point common sense had reached ten pages ago.

Yet if one makes it past the many pedantic issues Dworkin raises, one will finally come to the provocative, practical nub of his political theory: the distinction between fair and unfair differences in wealth. All philosopher's puzzles aside, Sovereign Virtue calls for a continuous redistribution of wealth much more massive than what is effected now. Dworkin gives no concrete figures, but he believes that "the wealth of everyone in a fair society would be much closer to the average than is true in America now: the great extremes between rich and poor that mark our economic life now would have largely disappeared" (p. 312). Only such a very large redistribution, he contends, would render persons tolerably equal in the extent to which their fates are determined by things beyond their control, but would also leave each person's fate sensitive to the choices he actually makes. Dworkin also argues for a universal healthcare system, a more generous welfare scheme, greater regulations on campaign expenditures and contributions, and race-sensitive admissions policies. But all of these positions, with the possible exception of the last, issue directly from the fundamental inequity Dworkin sees in the free-market distribution of wealth.

The free market distributes...