Strong Rights and Disobedience: From Here to Integrity

In Taking Rights Seriously Dworkin claimed that people had strong rights to disobey the law so that the government would be wrong to punish anyone who exercised them. This claim raises fundamental questions about the source of obligation and the limits of legitimacy. These questions of political theory have been given surprisingly little attention by him or his critics. I examine whether strong rights make any sense and conclude that his political theory cannot even generate the minimal prima facie obligation necessary to justify coercion, and hence, law. My solution is to interpret justice in the same way as law. Dworkin resists what I call Justice as Integrity because of concerns about ethical relativism. By considering his more recent works on objectivity and moral truth, I attempt to show that Dworkin’s aversion to Moral Constructivism is based on an undue fear of the uncertainty of social practices and an undue faith in the certainty of empirical observation. By reconstructing the interpretive derivations of justice I offer a method to make the idea of obligation, strong rights, and hence, law as integrity, more viable.