CONCEPT
Rights as Trumps
Dworkin's foundational claim that individual rights are not weights on the utilitarian scale but constraints that override the collective calculus—and therefore cannot be protected by any objective function, however well-designed.
A right, in
Ronald Dworkin's most influential formulation, is a trump—a claim an individual holds against the collective that defeats the ordinary calculus of aggregate advantage even when that calculus runs decisively against her. The metaphor is precise. In card games, a trump is not a higher card in the suit being played; it is a card from a different suit that overrides all cards in the played suit. A right functions the same way: it does not compete on the welfare ledger as a very heavy preference. It sits outside the ledger and overrules the ledger's verdict. This is why a right against discrimination is not defeated by the demonstration that discrimination is statistically predictive: predictive power is exactly the kind of reason the right exists to exclude from the calculation. The right earns its keep in precisely those cases where the utilitarian calculation says “deny” and the right replies “you may not.” In the age of algorithmic decision-making, the concept acquires a new