Fucking idiots.
Never trust an auto mechanic on environmental policy.

The urge to 'maximize' is only universal as a tendency, one that has been constrained in many ways over the history of human civilization.
It was not celebrated as a moral good until very recently, and is now only celebrated as such by those who those who would consider themselves realists by considering it an absolute [Darwinian?] universal.
From this they build arguments which are successful if and only if you accept the assumptions that precede their logic.
The wilingness to do that, as a liberal, is what accounts for the absurd structures of division and re-division in Dworkin's last book.

You can't deny the fact of individual conscience but neither can you deny the fact of collective activity and knowledge. One person can not invent language. There are no monads. We are products of our time more than producers of it. In accepting Epstein's pretense of a value-free logic, you abdicate a responsibility to the philosophical humanism of which the common law has played such an important part. The intellectual asks: What do we value? What is the relationship of the individual to the collective? What are the responsibilities of each to the other?

What do we value?
What should we value?

The defeat of Stalinism makes these shitheads so full of hubris they wants to believe, and they want you to believe, that it's dangerous- even a danger to democracy- to ask that last question.

What should we value? That's the question democracies ask of themselves. That's their cause and their reason for being.
The American people abdicated their responsibility in voting for an idiot. Judith Miller abdicated her responsibility. Neocons view that abdication as a moral good.