ABSTRACT
Ronald Dworkin suggests that government should legalise abortion yet aim to create a social atmosphere in which human life is seen as sacred. All human life, however, is sacred. A typical Catholic conservative might well claim both that the foetus has rights and that human life is sacred. If human life isn’t sacred then nothing is - not even liberty, or equality, or the pursuit of happiness. Dworkin ignores the rather obvious idea that sacred things are marked off from other intrinsically valuable items, for example gustatory pleasures, by being higher or more important. Dworkin is content to contrast the sacred with the incremental - a false dichotomy, of course, since some values are both sacred and incremental. For if the negative view, the view that life is not sacred, is not cosmic, Dworkin would not be able to claim constitutional protection for it. Political and legal documents can be morally suggestive but they are not really sacred.
