FREEDOM DOES NOT EXIST
For Dworkin there is no such thing as freedom. Freedom is not absolute it is relative. You have freedom of speech, for example. In this respect he follows in the food steps of MacCallum, though perhaps a bit less formal. With this approach he succeeds in eliminating the positive/negative freedom discussion, perhaps only for himself. But more importantly Dworkin started to address one of the core issues of freedom: me vs. we.

LUCK EGALITARIANISM
Dworkin aims for something admirable, he wants distributive justice. In his work he is trying to figure out how to implement egalitarianism without ending up in a welfare state. His system distributive justice is also called luck egalitarianism. This system divides luck into two types. One type is your own fault, given you have (access to) enough resources. The other type is not your fault. The obvious example, of course, is mental or physical handicaps incurred in birth. The second type is to be compensated by the government.

BUT NOT WELFARE
The term compensated is interesting because it shows how Dworkin thinks of the relationship between citizen and government. Provided the citizen has enough resources (including health) she is obliged (see ethical individuality below) to contribute. If she can’t because of bad luck outside of the personal sphere of influence the government needs to compensate. (This is definitely not welfare. Welfare would talk about providing resources to uphold a decent life. Dworkin compensates for the disability to be self supporting.)

ME VS. WE
Dworkin’s central concept is ‘ethical individuality’. Dworkin believes it is the responsibility of any individual to live, what he calls, the good life. With this he introduces responsibility/accountability from individual to society, but an aspect that is difficult to implement in policy and/or law. (Ethical individuality can be seen as John Stuart Mill’s individual self-development.)

Dworkin needed to introduce something like ethical individuality to fill in the responsibility from citizen to state. Without is he can’t reason about a fair/equal distributive system, and that is what he is looking for. The problem is that it introduces morality and subjectivity (the good life) both of which are difficult to deal with. The origin of this problem is not freedom but the roles of individuals and societies/governments. In Dworkin’s reasoning government is not ‘of the people’ (or even ‘the people’) but ‘for the people’.