In Sovereign Virtue and several well known papers and, most recently, in Justice for Hedgehogs, Ronald Dworkin has argued that – contrary to widely held views – there is no conflict between the values of liberty and equality: that their respective demands are perfectly compatible and mutually complementary. The view that they do conflict is, he says, attributable to a conception of liberty which is associated with the writings of Isaiah Berlin and which should be rejected in favour of a conception more integrally articulated in terms consonant with our idea of distributive justice. In this lecture, I argue that Berlin’s conception of liberty, consistently understood, is such that – contrary to both Dworkin and Berlin – its demands are perfectly compatible with those of distributive equality.
