Friday 21 January 2011

Dworkin's Attack on Sen

Thanks to the people over at Political Theory for this quick report on Ronald Dworkin's response to Sen's The Idea of Justice which raises a number of points against Sen that strike me as entirely apt, not least the general point concerning the problem of "weighting". Sen spends a lot of time attacking Rawls from a comparativist view without engaging either with the major factors that should be treated as key to any such comparison or showing what levels of priority should be given to any of them. Further, Sen spends sometime attacking Rawls' lexical priority of liberty which he even views as an "extreme" view without giving any consideration to the problem that without a scheme of lexical priority it is unclear how to view political problems at all except by referring to generic considerations that, however, as generic, are rarely the issue in dispute. The citations from Dworkin also suggest that his own work might well bear more consideration than Sen's.

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