Here are some thoughts on Chapter 1 - well, just on section 2 (’Procedural Democratic Theories’) of Chapter 1. There’s a lot to think about in the chapter. But we’ll be talking about components of the proposed value theory of democracy for a while. So maybe this is a time to look at some of the negative argument Brettschneider (hereafter ‘CB’) provides.

CB says that in section 2 “I demonstrated the weakness of procedural theories that fail to recognize their reliance on procedure independent standards”. I’m skeptical. Let’s focus on the more sophisticated form of pure proceduralism that CB discusses. CB writes: “[S]ome prominent theorists have developed a view I call ‘rights as procedural preconditions’ to democracy. On this account, the preconditions necessary for citizens to participate as equals must be guaranteed in a legitimate democracy. Supporters of these theories [e.g., Habermas] often claim, therefore, that the rights they defend are procedural, not substantive, because they only serve to enable a good democratic procedure.” Let’s call these views ‘procedural preconditions theories’ (PPTs).

CB raises two worries for PPTs. “First, it is possible that an empirical study could show that participation was causally unaffected by the preconditional rights these theorists have posited. The result of such a study would undermine purely preconditional defenses of democratic rights. Second, participants within a procedure who are guaranteed preconditional rights might make a decision to jettison the very rights they have been guaranteed. … Such a circumstance is problematic for the preconditional theorist because it forces her to claim both that, on the one hand, the source of legitimacy is the actual participation in the procedure, and, on the other hand, that preconditional rights are necessary for the procedure to be legitimate. The problem here is that the view is supposed to be justified fundamentally on procedural grounds. However, this would mean that those participating in the procedure could decide to revoke the preconditional rights this theory posits.”

My gut reaction is that if these worries work at all then they only work against very strong versions of PPT. Maybe Habermas’s theory is vulnerable to the worries. But that’s not totally clear to me. Either way we can imagine versions of the PPT strategy that say something like this:

PPTs needn’t - and shouldn’t - take the strong view that there is some set S of preconditional rights that must be satisfied in any given democratic political community in order for citizens in that community to be able to participate as equals in democracy (and, thus, that must be satisfied in order for a community to have a legitimate democracy). Instead PPTs should say that the job of theory is to suggest a well worked out, but nonetheless tentative, set S of possibly necessary preconditions for fair democratic procedures. In the practical sphere S would serve as a starting point: an initial statement of what preconditions must be established in a political community in order for there to be a legitimate democracy in that community. But, or so this sort of PPT view would go, S could be amended once established in a political community. For example, if some community that has taken on S decides that some member of S is jettisonable or decides that S needs adding to, then that community can vote to amend S for S*. And S* could likewise be supplantable by S**, S** with S***, and so on.

Many of the details here can be worked out in various ways. But the main idea is that it seems like an open option for friends of PPT to take on a softer stance about the set of preconditions that they prescribe. Instead of saying that the set is necessary, they can say that the set is possibly necessary (or maybe better: plausibly necessary). This softer stance then leaves open saying, in a manner speaking, that it should be left in the hands of the people to use and then trim or add to the intially theorized set come what may.

This sort of softer PPT view seems to avoid the problems CB raises. The particular softer PPT view we’re imaging can say, without facing a quandry, (vs. CB’s first worry): If an empirical study ends up showing that some member of S is jettisonable, then it’s open to any political community to replace S with S* (either as its actually accepted set of preconditions or as the set of preconditions that it’s trying to establish). Also, intuitively, if confronted with relevant empirical evidence, any paritcular softer PPT view can self-amend its proposed tentaive set of plausibly necessary preconditions. Similarly, as noted above, the softer PPT view can say without facing a quandry (vs. CB’s second worry): If some political community opts to jettison some member of S for some reason, it can straightforwardly move by its extant procedures to replace S with S*. After all S is just, or just aims to be, a well worked out but tentative starting point.

It’s worth emphasizing that where the softer PPT is ’softer’ is on the precondition front and not on the pure proceduralism front. That is, the softer sort of PPT can say - like the harder sort of PPT view that CB considers - that the sets of precondition rights that it proposes (as well as any distinct sets that a political community moves to) are procedural rights because (or in the sense that) they only serve to enable a good democratic procedure. The sets are, ex hypothesi, made up just of whatever is agreed at a certain time to be plausibly necessary for fairness in democratic procedures.

If the sort of softer PPT view that I’m sketching is plausible, then it seems like fans of such view can defend the preconditions strategy without, contra CB’s criticism of hard PPTs, “abandoning the idea that procedure serves as the fundamental locus of democracy.”

This is all just a sketch of a proposal, of course. But the spirit of the proposal seems intuitive. Also, as hinted at above, once we roughly mark out one way of developing a softer version of PPT, it seems intutiive to think that there’s an array of ways that softer PPTs can be developed that skirt CB objections.

None of this is to say that it isn’t fair enough that CB focuses on strong / hard versions of PPT. Philosophers tend to defend strong versions of views. So it’s natural to focus on such versions in critique. But it’s not obvious to me that fans of the PPT strategy have to or should take the strong / hard line that’s CB’s focus.

In a similar vein though, it’s also not obvious to me that CB needs his arguments against pure proceduralism to go through in order to motivate his project in general. There’s plenty of room in logical space for CB to develop his value theory of democracy as an alternative to (among others) pure proceduralisms even if we allow that pure proceduralisms are still a live option.