Twenty Years! ..as tarantulas in a bottle.

Anyone who cares to read The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory will find in it my responses to Dworkin’s criticisms—for there is nothing of substance in the review about our philosophical disagreements that he has not published before and I have not replied to before. I shall merely record my incredulity at his claim that his brand of moral philosophy, what I call “academic moralism,” is of “growing importance…in American legal education” (p. 52), and at his charge that I think philosophy has nothing to say about issues of fault, intent, causation, meaning, and responsibility in the law. He must know that I have used philosophy both in my academic writings and in my judicial opinions to illuminate those issues. But the branches of philosophy on which I have drawn are epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of action, rather than moral or political philosophy, concerning which I indeed have profound reservations.

I point out in Problematics that the preachments and the practices of academic moralists often don’t coincide. This review, in which we see Dworkin the academic moralist steering by a wobbly moral compass, is more evidence for the point.

Richard Posner
Chief Judge
US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit;
Senior Lecturer University of Chicago Law School



..and in this area near the neck of the bottle:

Ronald Dworkin replies:

Judge Posner says that my review of his two books was a personal attack, that it went beyond the boundaries of fair comment, that it was unethical of me to have reviewed his books at all, that I steer by a “wobbly moral compass,” that my review was “pervasively inaccurate and misleading,” that my “errors” show “a lack of familiarity” with the record and “the intricacies of federal criminal law and procedure,” and that for many years he has been challenging my “pretensions as a constitutional scholar and public intellectual.”

This carpet-bombing was apparently provoked by my doubts about whether his book, An Affair of State, violated the canons of judicial ethics, and I shall begin by defending those doubts. I shall then comment, one by one, on the “particulars” he offers to support his charge of pervasive inaccuracy.

He contests only a relatively few of the complaints I made about his own legal arguments and judgments in my review and its appendix, but I must comment in some detail on the arguments he does make. It is disturbing that though his challenges are delivered with great confidence, they are all, with one partial exception, based on serious misreports of his books or my review, or on fresh legal mistakes.


A tad reminiscent of Wittgenstein's Poker?
(Even the snide.. is dialed-in, in proper scale to the momentary nit being picked!) {sigh}
How a one--aimed towards Academia longs for a single, Authentic Mr. Chips amidst the inter-Ego-nicine Gladiators.

File this under category: Fine points for those in a career dedicated to the making, defining, disassembling and refining of mountains of such [bits] as may be reassembled into a fabric with an (any) Conclusion: the winner being the One whose--ultimately digital--decision favors.

(Reason! is, of course intermixed along the way--demonstrating that each is capable in that higher-realm too, sorta--but when sweet-Reason is employed as a condiment.. well, you can't make a Meal of it, can you?)

I calls it a Tie.