Ronald Dworkin

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) was an American legal philosopher best known for his theories of law as integrity, rights as trumps, and constitutional interpretation, developed against H.L.A. Hart's legal positivism. He held chairs at Yale, Oxford (succeeding Hart), University College London, and NYU. Although his primary contributions were to jurisprudence and political philosophy (Taking Rights Seriously, Law's Empire, Sovereign Virtue), late in life he addressed the philosophy of religion in his Einstein Lectures, published posthumously as Religion without God (2013). There Dworkin argued that 'religion' is broader than theism: a religious attitude consists in commitments to objective ethical value and to the inherent sublimity of nature, commitments shareable by atheists. Drawing on William James, Spinoza, and Einstein, he distinguished the 'science part' of religion (claims about a god) from the 'value part' (judgments about meaning and beauty), holding that the value part can stand independently. The argument extends the moral realism developed in Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), where Dworkin defended the unity and objectivity of value without metaphysical or theistic grounding. Critics including Simon Blackburn and Thomas Nagel questioned whether 'religion' so redefined retains useful content, while theists such as Richard Swinburne argued that objective value points back to theism. Dworkin's intervention remains a touchstone in debates over religious naturalism, the secularization of meaning, and the cognitive content of religious experience.