In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy - Hardcover

Beerbohm, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691154619 ISBN 13: 9780691154619

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2012

Synopsis

When a government in a democracy acts in our name, are we, as citizens, responsible for those acts? What if the government commits a moral crime? The protestor's slogan--"Not in our name!"--testifies to the need to separate ourselves from the wrongs of our leaders. Yet the idea that individual citizens might bear a special responsibility for political wrongdoing is deeply puzzling for ordinary morality and leading theories of democracy. In Our Name explains how citizens may be morally exposed to the failures of their representatives and state institutions, and how complicity is the professional hazard of democratic citizenship. Confronting the ethical challenges that citizens are faced with in a self-governing democracy, Eric Beerbohm proposes institutional remedies for dealing with them.


Beerbohm questions prevailing theories of democracy for failing to account for our dual position as both citizens and subjects. Showing that the obligation to participate in the democratic process is even greater when we risk serving as accomplices to wrongdoing, Beerbohm argues for a distinctive division of labor between citizens and their representatives that charges lawmakers with the responsibility of incorporating their constituents' moral principles into their reasoning about policy. Grappling with the practical issues of democratic decision making, In Our Name engages with political science, law, and psychology to envision mechanisms for citizens seeking to avoid democratic complicity.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Beerbohm is professor of government and director of graduate fellowships for the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

From the Back Cover

"Are citizens in a democracy complicit in the injustices perpetrated by a state that acts in their name? Yes they are, argues Eric Beerbohm.In Our Name is a major statement in democratic theory that develops a novel approach to the relationship between citizen and representative. This book will reorient our understanding of the nature of representation in a democracy and appeal to philosophers, political theorists, and social scientists alike."--Rob Reich, Stanford University

"In Our Name explores the moral and epistemic predicament of the democratic citizen, analyzing the ethics of participation, belief, and delegation that condition the responsibilities of citizens and their political representatives. Drawing on a distinctive theory of action, this account of complicity powerfully challenges the understanding of our duties as citizens."--Melissa Lane, author ofEco-Republic

"This book sets forth a highly innovative way of thinking about the meaning of democracy. Resisting the familiar claim that individuals have little or no causal impact on democratic laws or policies, Beerbohm makes the case for a compelling new vision of self-government. Emphasizing the centrality of individual responsibility in collective decision making, Beerbohm opens a path that other scholars working in democratic theory will have to walk through in the future."--Corey Brettschneider, Brown University

"This sharp and keenly argued book seeks to clarify the decision-making responsibilities of citizens and their representatives, given the complex ways in which they can be complicit in unjust political actions. Beerbohm offers a new ethics of participation grounded in the idea of citizens as political coprincipals and he provides institutional mechanisms to guide citizens' thoughts, decisions, and actions in democratic life."--Lucas Swaine, Dartmouth College

From the Inside Flap

"Are citizens in a democracy complicit in the injustices perpetrated by a state that acts in their name? Yes they are, argues Eric Beerbohm.In Our Name is a major statement in democratic theory that develops a novel approach to the relationship between citizen and representative. This book will reorient our understanding of the nature of representation in a democracy and appeal to philosophers, political theorists, and social scientists alike."--Rob Reich, Stanford University

"In Our Name explores the moral and epistemic predicament of the democratic citizen, analyzing the ethics of participation, belief, and delegation that condition the responsibilities of citizens and their political representatives. Drawing on a distinctive theory of action, this account of complicity powerfully challenges the understanding of our duties as citizens."--Melissa Lane, author ofEco-Republic

"This book sets forth a highly innovative way of thinking about the meaning of democracy. Resisting the familiar claim that individuals have little or no causal impact on democratic laws or policies, Beerbohm makes the case for a compelling new vision of self-government. Emphasizing the centrality of individual responsibility in collective decision making, Beerbohm opens a path that other scholars working in democratic theory will have to walk through in the future."--Corey Brettschneider, Brown University

"This sharp and keenly argued book seeks to clarify the decision-making responsibilities of citizens and their representatives, given the complex ways in which they can be complicit in unjust political actions. Beerbohm offers a new ethics of participation grounded in the idea of citizens as political coprincipals and he provides institutional mechanisms to guide citizens' thoughts, decisions, and actions in democratic life."--Lucas Swaine, Dartmouth College

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In Our Name

THE ETHICS OF DEMOCRACYBy Eric Beerbohm

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15461-9

Contents

Preface.................................................................ixIntroduction............................................................1Chapter 1 How to Value Democracy........................................25Chapter 2 Paper Stones: The Ethics of Participation.....................51Chapter 3 Philosophers-Citizens.........................................82Chapter 4 Superdeliberators.............................................105Chapter 5 What Is It Like to Be a Citizen?..............................125Chapter 6 Democracy's Ethics of Belief..................................142Chapter 7 The Division of Democratic Labor..............................166Chapter 8 Representing Principles.......................................193Chapter 9 Democratic Complicity.........................................226Chapter 10 Not in My Name: Macrodemocratic Design.......................252Conclusion..............................................................278Notes...................................................................287Bibliography............................................................327Index...................................................................324

Chapter One

How to Value Democracy

Our experience of democracy is intensely personal. As individual citizens, we don't interact with a system of decision making in a wholesale way. We interact with individuals in the retail of ordinary politics—we challenge those individuals on the opposing side at a town meeting, we provide identification to the polling official who directs us to the voting booth, we wonder about the authenticity of the lawmaker seeking our vote. There is nothing impersonal about being unjustly treated by a democratic society. Even regimes as undemocratic as apartheid South Africa and the American South before the Civil War relied on familiar tools of democracy—regular elections, a judge-oriented rule of law, lawmakers answerable to the enfranchised. If democratic procedures contain intrinsic value, you might have thought that it is somewhat less unjust for a large number of people to decide together to perform an injustice than for an authoritarian to order the same action. These citizens affronted the dignity of others, but at least they were free as holders of political power. On the other hand, an instrumental approach to democratic institutions will insist that, other things being equal, an injustice with a democratic pedigree is not morally worse than an authoritarian injustice. I think both of these answers are mistaken, but we need an explanation for this moral phenomenon. How can the fact that a serious injustice is democratically sponsored aggravate its wrongness?

The answer lies in the two kinds of relationships that a democratic system puts us in. First, we relate to our fellow citizens horizontally. We place demands on them—to organize with us or to reject a cause that we believe to be unjustifiable. When they fail to take our moral standing seriously, the felt attitude of resentment is not directed at an abstraction. It is the reaction of a participant in a seriously impaired human relationship. The object of our public protest is not impersonally conceived. We may critique an unjust or malfunctioning system, but we charge actual individuals with cowronging us using political means. Our signs and speech insist on their moral responsibility for directing state coercion to undermine our moral status. The relational character of democracy has a vertical dimension as well. We demand certain kinds of conduct from lawmakers we install in office and threaten to depose them when they violate our trust. Our managerial authority allows us to alter our lawmakers' treatment of other citizens. When they abuse their power to wrong others, our attitudes may range from indignation to the shame that we put them in this position. Here again there is an unavoidably interpersonal character to these demands. Citizens experience a bundle of participant attitudes—directed both horizontally and vertically—that provide us with raw data about the kinds of relationships that democratic institutions make possible. Our attitudes of indignation, resentment, and betrayal are reactions to wrongdoing. Their targets are agents and not mere institutional abstractions.

In this chapter I harness these participant attitudes. They can help us locate both the distinctive value and vulnerabilities of relating to each other as sharing authority over the coercive terms of our state. I develop a conception of democracy that appeals to a distinctive social relation that we bear to each other. My account identifies a mode of relating to each other horizontally and vertically—as cosubjects of the law and coauthors. In Hobbes's elegant picture, we have to understand ourselves as simultaneously "makers" and "matter." I argue that the justificatory nerve of democratic institutions is not to be found in the goodness of states of affairs that they tend to bring about. Nor does it reside in intrinsic properties contained in democratic procedures themselves. Instrumentalists and proceduralists, on my view, offer us the wrong kind of reasons. They neglect our role as "makers." Missing is how we can plausibly view democratic citizens as retaining a coauthoring authority. What we ultimately value about democratic practice, on my view, is that it makes possible for us to stand in a certain kind of relation with others—a relationship that recognizes them as mutually accountable, free, and rational persons. This is the sense in which democracy places us in an infrastructure of mutual liability.

My approach captures the moral value of democratic institutions in a way that is more purely nonconsequentialist than ordinarily supposed. I take this to be significant, because the phenomenology of moral life retains a strong deontological character. Think of the priority that we generally assign to avoiding individual wrongdoing, our experience of moral obligation, even our understanding of the point of our actions. These intuitions testify to an ethical outlook that is powerfully agent centered. If a conception of democracy makes use of these deontological ingredients, it may be in the position to dissolve puzzles generated by conceiving collective self-rule—and its correlative obligations of individual self-rule—in instrumental terms.

The argument proceeds by a process of elimination. Instead of cataloging the morally attractive features of democratic institutions, we will search for the most basic presumptive wrong entailed by denying democratic agency to coerced individuals or collectives. I argue that the neglected distinction between democracy as self-rule and democracy as answerable rule affects how we morally "score" democratic systems. This matters in assessing whether representative democracy is a pale attempt to mimic a more direct form of self-rule, or whether it can be construed as a first-best system. Auditing the value of democracy will create space for my relational approach. This way of understanding democracy can explain the dual roles built into the office of the citizen.

Two Concepts of Democracy

What's in a concept? You can always bypass an analysis of a political concept by fiat. Just insist upon a stipulative notion of democracy and delve right into substantive argument. I sympathize with this impatience. After all, we can't make significant headway by foregrounding one concept of democracy over another. The term is too philosophically freighted to admit to a conventional definition. With this modesty in mind, there are some political concepts with such powerful resonance in actual debate that we cannot ignore the moral force that they carry. Even at the purely conceptual level, our notion of democracy comes precharged with a positive valence. If we endorse the concept that tends to favor a substantive view that we hold, we risk smuggling in a conviction without argument. To avoid conceptual mischief, consider two criteria offered by H.L.A. Hart to aid us in fixing on a political concept among a menu of options. A concept may benefit the theoretical inquiry of the philosopher, or it may aid the moral deliberation of the practitioner. Each criterion marks out a plus in favor of a concept, but this pair comes unranked. The hardest cases will involve ties between the payoffs to theory and practice.

I believe that our rival concepts of democracy are torn between the supply side and the demand side. Political theorists—think of them as the suppliers—tend to converge on an idea of collective self-rule. To avoid subjugation, as a polity we must rule ourselves. When Ronald Dworkin offers a partnership approach to democracy, he is accepting this conception. Just as a dozen or so partners of a law firm can be described as corulers, so too can we understand the normative situation of millions of citizens in a functioning democracy. David Miller expresses this camp's approach with clarity: "Democracy is a system in which people come together to decide matters of common concern on the basis of equality, and the aim is to reach decisions that everyone can identify with, that is, can see as in some sense their decision." The picture of citizens gathering together is revealing. Decisions are ideally to be owned by all. I think the self-rule conception starts with a direct, Athenian model. This is not to say that it endorses plebiscites at the institutional level. But it views representative mechanisms as a second-best attempt to model an assembly democracy.

On the demand side things looks different. The citizen-practitioner stresses the indirectness of modern democratic structures. Here democracy gets construed not as a form of self-rule but as answerable rule. The democratic citizen sees herself in an unusually large and complex agency relationship. If you were asked on the street whether you and fellow citizens rule, I doubt that you would affirm this statement without qualification. Your answer may stress the imperfectness of the working democracy in which you find yourself. But you may well hold that, even if these failings were repaired, you are still not intuitively described as a ruler of any kind. "To understand the government in a democracy as an agent of the people," Bernard Williams writes, "implies an exceedingly strong model of democratic government as self-government, which cannot be applied literally to any modern democracy." Speaking to the experience of the ordinary citizen, Jean Hampton sharply rejects the former concept: "Our elected `representatives' don't represent us in any literal sense. This is nonsense. They rule and we don't." She reasons that it is the power of citizens to depose their leaders that marks out our signature idea of democracy. This thought is sharply distinct from a simple model of corule. Our rulers' accountability, not our putative joint rule, is doing the work here. "Even with all the referendums in the world," George Kateb pointedly writes, "there can be no popular self-rule in a modern democracy." He thinks our idea of democracy is representative through and through. It is a mistake to start from a direct model and then overlay an indirect organizational model. This approach tends to treat representative democracy as a first best, not a concession to a list of practical concerns. I am inclined to defend this division of viewpoints between democratic theorists and practitioners. The conception of democracy that I defend here is friendlier to the demand side, but what follows does not turn upon its correctness. We can leave it open whether there are fruitful ways of combining these two ideas into a broader concept.

Instead, I will distinguish between the concept and conception of democracy. A concept of democracy provides us with the general form of a solution. A conception of democracy is an attempt at a solution. I want to pose the problem of democratic theory in a way consistent with the two preceding concepts. How can we distribute a kind of labor in a way that respects our fundamental equality? Or we can put it negatively. What would a system of rules look like that left each of us without a boss? I am not claiming that this is the only way of posing it, but it is encompassing enough for our purposes. It captures a wide range of prominent views. What is more, it points to a conception—a candidate solution to the problem.

My approach treats democracy as a system of shared liability. Political philosophers like to speak of "divisions of labor" metaphorically. I begin by taking the idiom literally, following G.E.M. Anscombe's proposal that the root value of democracy lies in people's sharing the job of making political decisions. There is political work to be done, and this line of work is undesirable to many individuals. Setting and reforming the basic terms of interaction is a laborious activity. Citizens and lawmakers occupy positions of authority that carry with them significant moral liabilities. No matter how vanishingly small our individual contribution to this agency relationship can seem, I argue, we still are answerable to individuals who face the terms that we play some role in setting. Anscombe offers us a deceptively simple idea. It brings into focus the essential agent relativity of democracy's value. The insistence not simply that a certain decision is made correctly, but that we are integrated in its doing, is not as innocent sounding as it first may appear. It acknowledges our special concern for our collective "doings"—that you and I were part of a decision.

Even in its incipient form, democracy as shared liability has two conceptual advantages. First, it does not obviously run against the grain of ordinary use of democracy and its cognates. It neither assumes that the collective outputs of a democratic system are those we can identify with, nor does it rest upon an analogy between individual and collective self-rule. We can share in the job of governance while finding the ensuing laws to be odious and even alienating to our basic convictions. This is important in light of our theoretical ambitions here. If we build the idea of identification into our concept, it can become difficult to make sense of our responsibilities as citizens under unjust institutions. It is precisely our experience of distress of living under laws that are morally unacceptable and yet linked to our agency that it is urgent for us to explain. At the same time, the conception of democracy that I defend is carefully limited in its scope. What we owe each other as persons is not exhausted by what we owe each other as citizens. Individuals who stand in a genuinely democratic relation are quite capable of enacting legislation that is objectionable from a moral point of view. My approach can explain the pretheoretical idea that democratically sponsored injustice is a frequent part of our world. It stands in contrast with attempts to construe democracy in a more capacious way.

Second, this conception packs relatively lightly, helping itself to a minimalist set of assumptions from the theories of value, action, and knowledge. It preserves the possibility of extending and refining our intuitions. While not immediately surprising, it is not without teeth. We need only compare it with a view of democracy that recurs in the empirical literature. Correspondence theories treat democracy as a form of responsiveness to people's preferences. They imagine simulating a direct democracy by studying the "congruence between changes in policy and changes in opinion." Is popular sentiment efficiently converted into policy? Or, in one of the earliest formulations in political science, how much overlap is there between the preferences of the legislator and district? Later I clarify whether this view should be rejected, and what it implies for our responsibilities as citizens.

For now, we can see what is missing from this correspondence picture. As citizens we engage in a shared activity—an authority role that does not derive from preferences we happen to have but from decisions that we make. You could better honor the principle of responsiveness by organizing a political system around public opinion tracking rather than voting. Even better, you could exploit brain-scanning technology that would allow the formulation of public policy without citizens even having to state their political convictions. We feel intuitive unease when we imagine political institutions that passively reflect our desires—conscious and unconscious. What is missing, then, from the correspondence view is the recognition of our managerial role as citizens. We view ourselves not merely as cosubjects with, say, carefully tracked preferences but as coauthors who share in decision-making labor. The task for the remainder of this chapter is to explain how it is possible for citizens to decide together, and why we take it as valuable.

The Audit

Suppose you are charged with conducting an audit of democracy. What is the source of its value? You could launch this investigation from the outside in. As a systems administrator, you stand apart from democratic institutions, noticing structural properties that seem morally significant. Viewing democratic structures in toto, it is natural to score them on the basis of their performance. They reliably produce desirable states of affairs—discouraging wars and fostering the self-esteem of their occupants. Democratic systems outperform their rivals. They "enrich the lives of citizens." Instrumental arguments of this form have considerable appeal.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from In Our Nameby Eric Beerbohm Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691154619
• ISBN 13: 9780691154619
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368