This article was originally published on Princeton University Press.
By Jason Brennan
What kind of value does democracy have? Should we value it the way we value hammers, paintings, or persons?
When we ask what makes a hammer valuable, we usually ask whether it is functional for us, as we are. Hammers have a purposeto pound in nails, and good hammers serve that purpose. Hammers primarily have instrumental value. They help us achieve an independent goal. If some other tool better serves that goal, then wed gladly replace our hammers with that other tool. No one insists on using a hammer when a driver or wrench works better.
When we ask what makes a painting valuable, we usually look to its symbolic value. We ask whether the painting is sublime, whether it evokes various feelings or ideas. We also value some paintings more highly because of how they were made, and who made them. An ugly Picasso scribble on a napkin might fetch a hundred grand, but if you or I drew the same picture, it wouldnt fetch a dollar.
When we ask what makes human beings valuable, we will often say that they are ends in themselves. Sure, people can also have instrumental valuethe person who makes you coffee serves a purposebut they also have intrinsic value. People have a dignity, not a price, or so many philosophers insist.
What about democracy? Most political philosophers agree that democracy has instrumental value. It functions pretty well, and tends to produce relatively just outcomes. So, they think, democracy is valuable at least in the way a hammer is valuable.
They have a point. In general, the best places to live are liberal democracies, not genuine monarchies, sham democracies, oligarchies, or one party states. But, still, if democracy only has the kind of value a hammer has, then if were able to identify a better functioning form of government, a form of government that better realizes procedure-independent standards of justice, we would happily replace democracy with this better functioning regime.
However, most philosophersand many laypeople living in modern democraciesalso think we should value democracy the way we value a painting or a person. They claim that democracy uniquely expresses the idea that all people have equal worth and value. They claim that democratic outcomes are justified because of who made them and how they were made. They see democracy as an end in itself. Some philosophers think that democracy is an inherently just decision-making procedure. A few go so far as to hold that anything a democracy decides to do is justified simply because a democracy decided to do it. They deny there any procedure-independent standards by which to judge what democracies do.
Proceduralism is the view that certain political regimes are inherently just or that certain regimes are inherently unjust. Proceduralists about democracy tend to think democracy has the kind of value, paintings and people have. For instance, the philosopher Thomas Christiano seems to think democracy is an end in itself, while David Estlund argues most other forms of government other than democracy are inherently unjust.
[su_pullquote align=”right”]Pure proceduralism, the most radical version of proceduralism, holds that there are no independent moral standards for evaluating the outcome of the decision-making institutions.[/su_pullquote]
Pure proceduralism, the most radical version of proceduralism, holds that there are no independent moral standards for evaluating the outcome of the decision-making institutions. Whatever a democracy does is just, only because a democracy does it. This viewwhich is popular among certain democratic theoristsis on reflection rather absurd. For instance, suppose we had a dispute about whether citizens should be allowed to rape children. Suppose the majority votes, after following an idealized deliberative procedure, to allow adults to rape any children they please. They also vote to have the police ensure that no one stops adults from raping children. A pure proceduralist about democracy would have to say that, in this case, child rape would indeed be permissible. For that reason, pure proceduralism appears to be absurd. There are at least some procedure-independent standards of justice.
It would be odd if there were independent moral truths about how to make decisions but not independent truths about what we may do.
Instrumentalism, in contrast, holds that there are procedure-independent right answers to at least some political questions and what justifies a distribution of power or decision-making method is, at least in part, that this distribution or that method tends to select the right answer. So, for instance, in criminal law, we have an adversarial system, in which one lawyer represents the state and the other represents the defendant. There is an independent truth of the matter about whether the defendant is guilty. This truth is not decided by the jurys fiat. Rather, the jury is supposed to discover what the truth is. Defenders of jury trials and the adversarial system believe that, as a whole, the system tends to track the truth better than other systems. If they learned they were mistaken about that, theyd stop advocating jury trials.
When it comes to democracy, do you advocate it on procedural grounds, instrumental grounds, or both?
In my forthcoming book Against Democracy, I argue that democracy is nothing more than a hammer. It is a means to an end, but not an end in itself. It is not intrinsically just. It is not justified on proceduralist grounds. Any value democracy has is purely instrumental. If we can find a better hammer, were obligated to use it. Further, I argue, theres a good chance we know what the better hammer would be, and its time to experiment and find out.
Jason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.
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