Depth: Foundation
Contributions to threads
Equality should compare resources rather than welfare and distinguish chosen risks from unchosen disadvantage.
1981 CE · certain
Dworkin combines an envy-free hypothetical auction with an insurance market behind limited ignorance, using compensation to model equal concern without making every resulting inequality unjust.
Works or evidence:What is Equality? Part 2, sections on the auction and hypothetical insurance.
Sources: 3; 1Intellectual setting
Dworkin wrote across postwar disputes in jurisprudence, civil rights, welfare, abortion, and constitutional interpretation, moving between philosophy and public legal argument.
Key ideas
Rights as trumps
Individual rights protect persons against policies justified only by aggregate welfare or a majority's preferences and are central to law's demand for equal concern and respect.
Equality of resources
An equal auction of resources tests envy, while later differences may reflect choices; the scheme aims to distinguish option luck from circumstances for which persons are not responsible.
Hypothetical insurance
Imagining insurance choices made without knowledge of one's talents or disabilities helps set compensation for brute luck without requiring identical welfare outcomes.
Legacy
His accounts of rights, integrity, and equality remain central in jurisprudence and egalitarian theory, especially debates about responsibility, luck, and the metric of equality.