Two familiar features of Ronald Dworkin's theory of adjudication generate a strange predicament. On the one hand, Dworkin maintains that most cases, including most “hard” cases, have “right answers.” On the other hand, Dworkin argues that to discover that right answer, judges must avail themselves of moral considerations and moral argument: a party's rights follow from the principle that explains some significant portion of the prior institutional history and provides the best justification for that institutional history as a matter of political morality. But if moral considerations figure decisively in determining the answer to a legal dispute, then there can only be a single right answer as a matter of law if there is a single right answer to the question of political morality. Yet if morality is, as many seem to think, “subjective” in some sense, then there may be as many right answers as a matter of morality as there are judges and thus, consequently, no single right answer as a matter of law. Here is how John Mackie put the worry many years ago:

[W]hat the law is, on Professor Dworkin's view, may crucially depend on what is morally best – what is best, not what is conventionally regarded as best in that society. Now I would argue … that moral judgments of this kind have an irreducibly subjective element. If so, then Professor Dworkin's theory automatically injects a corresponding subjectivity into statements about what the law is.