Soc Choice Welf (2014) 42:759–760DOI 10.1007/s00355-013-0780-9

OBITUARY

In memoriam Ronald Dworkin

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Ronald Dworkin, one of the foremost legal, constitutional, and political philosophersof his time, died at age 81 in February 2013. As well as publishing numerous scholarlybooks and articles, he was a public intellectual in the United States, writing clear anderudite articles on legal and political issues in the press, notably the New York Reviewof Books.

Among economists, Dworkin is best known for two papers he published in 1981,in which he proposed an alternative egalitarian theory to that of John Rawls’s. Rawls,in his 1971 book, had attempted to ground his distributive principle—to maximize thebundle of “primary goods” that the worst-off group in society receives—in an “origi-nal position” argument, designed to enforce impartiality among the decision makers,who represented, in an abstract sense, persons in actual society. Rawls, however,deprived his decision makers of so much information—including what the distrib-ution of preferences and resources was in actual society—that decision theory wasuseless. He resorted to assuming that the decision makers would be hyper-risk-averse,and would be concerned only with guaranteeing themselves the highest minimumpossible.

123

760 In memoriam Ronald Dworkin

Dworkin refined Rawls’s original position: it would be inhabited by souls whoare postulated to know the preferences of the actual beings whom they represent.They do not, however, know the wealth and resources (including talents) their beingspossess in actual society, and, in Dworkin’s thought experiment, they participate inan insurance market in which they can purchase contingent claims on resources, tobe delivered after the birth lottery occurs and identities are revealed. In this insurancemarket thought-experiment, souls behind the veil of ignorance are equipped withequal endowments of currency with which to purchase insurance. Since souls use therisk preferences of their beings in deciding what insurance to purchase, Dworkin haddesigned a mechanism in which persons were held responsible for their preferences,but not for their resources. Redistributive taxation, Dworkin suggested, should attemptto implement the distribution of alienable resources (wealth) that would have beenproduced by the insurance contracts.

Dworkin made the distinction between brute and option luck. Brute luck is thatwhich a person is exposed to without choice, and against which she has no opportunityto insure. Option luck is that which a person chooses to face (as in gambling), or luckwhich can be protected with insurance. Dworkin viewed the distribution of resources(both alienable and inalienable) as a matter of brute luck, and his insurance mechanismwas a technique for turning that brute luck into option luck. It was a clever attempt todesign a distributive rule which would hold persons responsible for their preferences,but not for the brute luck of the birth lottery, which assigns wealth, families, and genesto persons. He believed this was the proper way of “equalizing resources.”

It turned out that both Dworkin’s economics and his philosophy were subjected tocriticism. On the economic front, it was shown that the insurance mechanism couldwork in a way opposite to what Dworkin intended—it could, in simple examples, endup transferring wealth from handicapped to able persons, even when all shared thesame risk-averse von Neumann Morgenstern utility function. On the philosophicalfront, his view that persons should be responsible for their preferences was contested,on the grounds that preferences were massively influenced by the social backgroundof their holders, and in particular, were often inadequate for representing persons’interests, especially if they were formed as a reaction to poorly resourced childhoods.

Dworkin’s articles on equality ignited a vital resurgence in both political philosophyand social choice theory; they placed issues of responsibility front and center in left-liberal egalitarian thought. In social choice theory, they offered an alternative focusfrom Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and voting theory.

Dworkin was also well-known for his lecture style; he would give hour-long talkswithout consulting a note. In the 1990’s, he, Amartya Sen, and G.A. Cohen ran aseminar at Oxford, in which they sparred on the main problems of political philosophy,and at New York University, where he also taught, he and Thomas Nagel ran a seminarin which they presented the paper of the invited speaker, and then grilled him/her beforea large audience, for an hour or so. These events were famous.

Dworkin’s posthumous book, Religion without God, has been published by HarvardUniversity Press.

John E. RoemerYale University

123