Volume 15, 2018
Human Rights
Miracy B. S. Gustin
Pages 29-34
Law as Ideology
The Politicization of Excluded Social Groups
It is not possible to refuse the obvious condition that in complex societies law as ideology adds important values to the knowledge of contemporary problems. Here, we will understand ideology as the proposal of independent moral principles as “good life” in Dworkin’s terms. In his article in the New York Review of Books (2011), the author declares that “moral standards prescribe how we ought to treat others; ethical standards, how we ought to live ourselves. The happiness that Plato and Aristotle evoked was to be achieved by living ethically”. In our proposal, we will submit to the debate this theory of good life applied to the great problems of excluded social groups in large cities and how Law is able to politicize the themes of Human Rights in peripheral societies. I will establish that good life and living ethically is possible even in excluded conditions. In resume, I will apply some of Dworkin’s statements in his book Justice for Hedgehogs, where he tries to find some conceptions of what it is to “live well”. Since for him morality should not depend on any benefit that being moral might bring, it must be categorical. We are forced to reinterpret this view once a good life is required to face perverse human conditions of social justice.