Articles by Ben Saunders

Last night I gave a talk to the Moral Philosophy Seminar in Oxford, which received particularly good questions from Joseph Raz and John Broome (among others). As often, the paper has been posted for discussion on the blog Ethics-Etc (direct link to the paper here). Since it’s really political philosophy, I thought I’d draw attention to that here, for any interested readers.

Abstract:  

This paper challenges the common assumption that democracy requires majority rule. I assume that we can adopt a contractualist approach to uncover the demands of political equality and argue that contractors would not necessarily accept majority rule to make decisions in their society. I first reject broadly consequentialist arguments, arguing that firstly no procedure guarantees ideally best outcomes, secondly that in cases of pluralism there is no need to suppose there is a uniquely best outcome, and thirdly that we need to be fair between different individuals. I develop this need for fairness into a case for weighted lotteries, drawing on the Taurek-Scanlon ‘saving the greater number’ debate. This leads to my conclusion that democratic ideals can be realized by selecting a random vote to determine the outcomes of decisions.

Here is the fourth installment of our reading group on Democratic Authority, which focuses on chapter 4, “The Limits of Fair Procedure.”

Summary

Estlund starts this chapter by applying the Euthyphro problem to democratic decision-making: are outcomes good because they are democratically chosen or democratically chosen because they are good? Estlund accepts that democracy is a matter of the collective authorization of laws, which is a procedural arrangement. While an infallible benevolent dictator might be able to bring about substantively just outcomes, there would be nothing democratic about that. Estlund’s argument, however - which occupies this chapter and the next - is that recent democratic theory has focused too exclusively on fair procedures to the exclusion of the independent rightness of decisions. This chapter criticizes the idea that procedural fairness can alone justify democratic procedures and begins criticizing normative social choice theory (e.g. Arrow), while chapter five continues the argument with focus on ‘deep deliberative democracy’.

Read the rest of this entry »