Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality pdf

罗纳德·德沃金 (Ronald Dworkin) 享年 81 岁，被广泛尊为英语世界中最具原创性和影响力的法学哲学家。在他的著作、文章和他在伦敦和纽约的教学中，他对法律进行了强有力的、学术性的诠释，并阐述了热门话题和公众关注的问题——包括法律应如何处理种族、堕胎、安乐死和平等——以非专业读者可以理解的方式。他的法律论点被巧妙地应用于经典自由主义哲学的具体问题，而这反过来又基于他的信念，即法律必须从普通人公认的道德美德中获得权威。 德沃金在牛津大学和哈佛法学院学习哲学（在哈佛大学的威拉德·范·奥尔曼·奎因（Willard Van Orman Quine）的指导下，非正式地在牛津大学的 JL Austin 学习）和法律。在耶鲁大学和后来的纽约大学法学院以及牛津大学教授法律之前，他曾担任伟大的美国法官和法律学者 Bil​​lings Learned Hand 的文员，以及华尔街律师事务所 Sullivan & Cromwell 的执业助理以及后来的伦敦大学学院。 这种广泛的教育和训练，磨练了一个异常强大的智力的分析技能，使他即使是一个早熟的年轻人，也能挑战法律和法理学界最杰出的人物，包括汉德和赫拉·哈特，著名的代表人物法律实证主义——将法律的社会基础与其优点分开考虑——在牛津。德沃金最大的成就也许是他坚持以权利为基础的法律理论，这在他的第一本也是最有影响力的著作《认真对待权利》（1977 年）中进行了阐述，在书中他提出了一种替代哈特的观点和新兴的法律理论哈佛法学家约翰·罗尔斯。

Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality pdf 罗纳德·德沃金

Equality is the endangered species of political ideals. Even left-of-center politicians reject equality as an ideal: government must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its citizens be equal in any dimension. In his new book Ronald Dworkin insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern, and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that distribution. What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles--first, it is of equal objective importance that all human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life--to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood except in the context of actual and complex political issues, Dworkin develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.