Principles and Touchstones: The Dilemma of Dworkin's Liberalism

Ronald Dworkin has proposed a set of four "conditions of adequacy" for reconstructing liberal political theory. Kenneth Winston argues here that these conditions necessarily involve two mutually incompatible conceptions of theory formation that yield contradictory results. He then proposes a way of moving beyond the dilemma, so created, by elaborating a theory of common goods.