Volume 40, Number 13 · July 15, 1993
Partisan For Life
By T.M. Scanlon
Life's Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom
by Ronald Dworkin
Knopf, 273 pp., $23.00
Ronald Dworkin is our leading public philosopher. Over the past twenty-five years, mainly in these pages, he has taken up some of the most difficult issues facing us as a nation: military conscription and civil disobedience, affirmative action and the meaning of equality, the scope and meaning of the First Amendment, the case for public funding of the arts, the question of abortion, and the nature of constitutional interpretation. Since Dworkin is a lawyer and legal theorist as well as a philosopher, and in view of our well-known national tendency to turn difficult questions of politics and value into legal questions, it is not surprising that most of these topics have obvious legal implications, and that the issue of constitutional interpretation lurks in the background of almost all of the others. But Dworkin has not addressed these issues as technical questions of law. Indeed, in his view, fundamental constitutional issues are rarely technical and usually pose questions of political morality. Accordingly, his articles are probing and reflective inquiries into how the values at stake in these controversies can best be understood.
Review, 7403 words
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