2
Justifying Democracy
WITHIN contemporary democratic theory, questions about why we value democracy have begun to displace questions about the best form or model of democracy. In some ways, this constitutes a return to a much older discussion. The history of democratic theory is the history of the justification of democracy, so arguments about the superiority or inferiority of democracy vis-a-vis other options are not new. But the context of the justification is new in two important respects. First, we know a great deal more today than at any time in history about how real-world democracies function, thrive, and fail. Second, democracy appears to be in trouble after a period which saw the growth and spread of democracy around the globe, in fits and starts to be sure, but with a clear trajectory. That trajectory seems to have changed from ascending to declining. The normative theoretical question "Why democracy?" cannot ignore the massive amount of empirical research on democracy nor the clear signs of precarity, despite a global love fest for the ideal.
Contemporary debates have not given up trying to make democracy the best that it can be. Identifying the core appeal of democracy will have consequences for reform and questions about how we can make democracy better, but for the most part these are not articulated in terms of promoting one type of democracy over another. Tellingly, the contrast is often about why we should value democracy over more autocratic, technocratic, meritocratic, epistocratic, oligarchic, or market-based alternatives. This, I have suggested in the introduction, is tied to deep worries about the resilience of democracy in the twenty-first century. While it is rare to see philosophers suggesting that democracy be cast aside altogether, it is not uncommon to see arguments that less rather than more democracy would be a good thing (Bell 2015; Brennan 2016; Jones 2020) or to suggest that we lower our sights when it comes to what democracy can achieve (Achen and Bartels 2016). In addition to scholarly doubt and skepticism about democracy's virtues, ordinary citizens are reporting sinking trust in democratic institutions and an apparent willingness to vote for parties and leaders who promote democratic backsliding, meaning weakening and undermining institutions and norms that constitute the conventional measures of democratic robustness. This context helps explain the shift of focus from competing models of democracy to justifications of democracy.
In this and the next five chapters, I parse out the various arguments and positions that are animating this debate and why the question of democracy's value is important. This preliminary chapter introduces some general fault lines dividing competing arguments; offers some commentary about the terms "intrinsic," "procedural," "outcome-based," and "instrumental" that are everywhere in the literature; addresses what is meant by "value" in relation to legitimacy; and finally assesses what is at stake in the value of democracy debate.
A new vocabulary
What is so good about democracy? Why do we or ought we to value it above other forms of rule? The debate has evolved to produce two types of answers. One type of answer maintains that democracy's value is to be found in the procedures themselves more than the substantive outcomes that emerge from the procedures. That is, how democracies make decisions is more important than what they decide. Democracy might not always produce the best policy. Perhaps an enlightened despot or benevolent technocrat might get it right more often than the people, and in any case, do we even have an independent standard of what counts as a good outcome to use as a yardstick that we all agree on? Democracy, however, is the only fair way to make decisions among people who see themselves as free and equal - or so it is argued. This type of theory is said to look for the intrinsic value of democracy or is described as procedural.
The other set of arguments looks at democratic procedures instrumentally or from the point of view of outcome. Here democracy's value is that it produces peace, prosperity, and stability or better policy, law, and governance than other forms of decision making. Instrumental and outcome-based views of democracy also potentially produce theory that is skeptical of overvaluing democracy. Perhaps democracy is not always the best way to make a decision. Perhaps democracy gets lots of things wrong and has bad outcomes. A strict instrumentalist will then have to say that in these cases we should rethink an unreserved enthusiasm for democracy. It is of course possible to value democracy for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons. And many democratic theorists fall into that category (Anderson 2009; Habermas 1996). But an interesting twist to this debate is the insistence of some philosophers that only one or the other of these perspectives is defensible. Thus champions of the intrinsic value sometimes argue that there is no objective or agreed upon measure of good outcomes (this is precisely what we argue about in democracy) and so we must abandon the good outcome approach altogether (Christiano 2008; Waldron 1999). Strict instrumentalists ask what is the point of a decision procedure if it does not have good outcomes (Arneson 2003; Wall 2007)? If democracy cannot make our lives better and solve pressing problems, then no amount of intrinsic value (which is difficult to identify and measure anyway) can make up for that fact.
This way of parsing justifications of democracy - using the vocabulary of intrinsic, procedural, outcome, and instrumental - is very widespread. In the first two pages of an essay entitled "Democracy's Value: A Conceptual Map," Elana Ziliotti cites over 50 contemporary works that draw on this vocabulary, and this list is in no way exhaustive. She admits, however, that "the basic terms of the debate are quite unclear; there are no agreed meanings attached to these terms" (Ziliotti 2020: 408). On the one hand, the terms are used differently by different theorists, and this has led to some confusion. But, on the other hand, attempts at analytic precision in these terms have tended to sidetrack the debate away from real-world political concerns and into technicalities of analytic philosophy. I hope to steer a middle course here, cleaving to ordinary language meanings as much as possible. The discussion that follows is somewhat abstract nevertheless, but I think it will be helpful for when we go deeper into the specific theories explained and analyzed in chapters 3-7.
Intrinsic value
Intrinsic value refers to something that is a good-in-itself or good for its own sake as opposed to something that is good because of some consequence or other good it might produce. This is also sometimes referred to as non-derivative value, for obvious reasons (Viehoff 2019), or content-independent value, meaning the procedure has value independent of the substantive outcome produced by the procedure. A classic example of intrinsic value might be found in Aristotle's discussion of happiness.1 People do not value happiness because it brings some other goods, like wealth, health, or success. People want these other goods because they bring happiness. But thinking of democracy as having intrinsic value in the sense of happiness requires that we say much more about what democracy is.
We might think that free and fair elections are good, but does it make sense to think of them as good in themselves like happiness? This does not seem plausible as we can have free and fair elections for dogcatcher in one municipality and a system of appointment of dogcatcher in the next municipality without violating any intrinsic good. The intrinsic value must involve more than the technical procedures of voting and elections that we associate with democratic governance. Most defenders of the intrinsic value of democracy connect it to some other value, for example, justice, equality, or freedom. But then it looks like we value democracy not for its own sake but for the sake of, say, equality unless we want to say that democracy and equality just are the same thing. Furthermore, if something is a good-in-itself, does this mean that it must be good in all circumstances? Some classical philosophers certainly thought so. This seems implausible for democracy even before we specify what we might mean by democracy. There are clearly circumstances and situations (in a crisis, within a family, choosing a spouse) where democratic procedures or values would not be advisable, appropriate, or "good."
These sorts of puzzles have led to abstract and technical discussions about what terms like "value" and "intrinsic" really mean (Korsgaard 1996; Ziliotti 2020) and this, it seems to me, has distracted from questions about why we (real people living in the twenty-first century) might value democracy. We do not need a technically airtight conception of "intrinsic" to grasp the core intuition that procedures that treat people fairly, for example, or with equal respect can have value independent of the outcome of those procedures. We value processes and procedures independent of outcomes all the time from cooking to playing chess. In the case of democracy, however, it is usually not based on pleasure but rather on a moral or ethical good that inheres in the practice, and not the outcome. One might argue that treating people as equals is good; "one person, one...
