Why Value Democracy?
Published by Brian Berkey August 3rd, 2006 in PhilosophyIn my post entitled Capitalism, Utopianism, and Democracy I say this:
What is perhaps most striking about the articles written by the free marketeers is that, despite containing a great deal of commentary on the role of government, there is no mention of democracy. They clearly emphasize that it is an essential role of government to protect free competition in the marketplace; nowhere do they also claim that it is the role of government to carry out the will of the people. … Their committment to capitalism is prior to their commitment to democracy (this, of course, is not unusual on the American right).
In his response, Hanno says the following:
This is clearly an accurate observation. Even though most free market libertarians are committed to the democratic process, that commitment is usually instrumental in nature. Most libertarians value individual freedom higher than democracy. But is that really a shortcoming? The libertarian concern with democracy is rooted in an individualist political philosophy. Any subordination of the individual will under the collective will, as envisioned, for example, by Rousseau, cannot be conceptualized as a realization of freedom from a libertarian standpoint. Freedom, for libertarians, is primarily a negative concept, defined roughly as the absence of arbitrary interference with the realization of an individual’s subjective preferences. As indicated above, libertarians and free marketers are suspicious of any form of “summing people up,” to use David Friedman’s phrase. Of course, a totalitarian way of summing people up under the banner of an official ideology is worse than the democratic summing up of individual votes, but the fear of majoritarian rule, however achieved, persists. That, I submit, is a perfectly reasonable concern, and treating democracy as a means to the end of individual freedom should not discredit a political philosophy on moral grounds.
While I certainly agree with Hanno’s concluding point that valuing democracy only instrumentally in no way discredits a political philosophy on moral grounds (one could certainly be a thorough-going consequentialist about the value of political arrangements and procedures), I wonder about the implications of this stance for libertarian views (such as Hanno’s) in particular. Specifically, it’s not clear to me that libertarians can argue, consistent with their view that individual liberty is intrinsically valuable, that the democratic process is only instrumentally valuable, insofar as it contributes to ensuring that individuals retain as much personal liberty as possible. After all, the democratic process is, at least ideally, the means by which individuals’ preferences are given voice in decisions about how society functions. It provides individuals with a forum to express their preferences regarding society’s political and economic structure, and the opportunity to have one’s preferences count in such essential social decision-making is, at least arguably, one of the most important forms of the individual liberty that libertarians value intrinsically. In fact, it seems to me a necessary element of any scheme of ordered liberty. Without the democratic process there is either a form of political authority that is not determined by the expression of individuals’ preferences, or else there is anarchy (it is, of course, conceivable that a regime not empowered through democratic processes might choose to adopt policies that reflect the popular will, but as a practical matter this is unlikely). It seems, then, that valuing individual liberty intrinsically may, at least in some sense, entail valuing democracy intrinsically as well.
Of course libertarians are likely to insist, and rightfully so, that society not be governed entirely on the basis of majority preference, because the majority is sure to support at least some policies that infringe on fundamental rights of members of minority groups. The question for the free marketeers that I discuss above, then, assuming I am right that valuing individual liberty intrinsically entails valuing democracy intrinsically, is whether the right to the sort of economic liberty that libertarians tend to endorse is a fundamental right (such as, say, freedom of speech and religion) that even the democratic process should not be able to take away. I contend that it is not. But that is a subject for a future post.
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Welcome on board, Brian! And thanks for the interesting post.
I am not sure that the “democratic process is, at least ideally, the means by which individuals’ preferences are given voice in decisions about how society functions.” In a constitutional democracy, decisions about how society functions are one step removed from political decisions, through a super-majoritarian requirement for constititutional amendments. In some countries, certain core constitutional provisions are even entirely removed from the democratic process and cannot be amended (Art. 79 III of the German federal constitution, for example, precludes constitutional amendments that would limit Germany’s federal structure, the participation of the states in the legislative process, or the basic guarantees of human dignity, the existence of fundamental rights, and the structure of the country as a socially-responsible democracy in which all state power derives from the will of the people.) This means that a democracy may still be a democracy without the structure of the state and of the government up for grabs (all the time).
Could the Congress in the US constitutionally abolish the bill of rights? The easy Hart/Wechsler answer is yes, because the fundamental guarantors of liberty in the US are the states, not the federation. But do we really believe that today? (The dizzing possibility of an unconstitutional constitutional amendment has been explored by some courts.)
If the functioning of democracy is not on the same level as the political decsisions taken within the democratic process, the interesting question becomes: is the original adoption of a constitution a democratic act, part of a democratic process? I have my doubts, and would not regard a democracy as fundamentally flawed because its structure and processes were imposed, rather adopted or ratified by the people. (This matters for the many emerging democracies we see today.)
Hey Brian.
Some of this depends on what one means by “intrinsic”. There’s a hive of inevitable ambiguities there. First, there’s the distinction between the axiological and social psychological senses of the terms. Second, there are a number of formulations for the former: there’s the ordinary formulation, my formulation, and Dewey’s formulation.
A.
I. In the axiological sense, some property P is intrinsically valuable if and only if:
a) P is always valuable;
b) Any randomly chosen valuable property R will also have P.
Or at least that seems to be the standard line. This is meant to be in opposition to an “instrumentally valuable” thing, of course, which is only valuable as a means to some other end.
II. But I would argue for a third component:
c) Valuable property R can always be understood to contain P as a part of it.
III. John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy compelled him to say that, in one sense, everything of value is instrumentally valuable; and, in another sense, everything of value is intrinsically valuable. For him, broadly speaking, all concepts are instruments which we use to deal with the world. More narrowly, all values are instrumental because there are no fixed or final moral ends. No goods are intrinsically valuable without qualification. But even more narrowly, all moral goods are intrinsically valuable in that that some goods are better suited to certain personalities and situations than others: in this way, moral goods are intrinsic-to-a-situation.
B.
The social psychological sense is a special case of the intrinsic-instrumental distinction, where something is intrinsically valuable if and only if it is generally held for its own sake by the person. This is opposed to an extrinsically valuable thing, which is only valuable because other people reward you for doing it. Posting about philosophy on blogs would be an example of the former, and working to get a paycheck would be the latter.
This is somewhat important because people use the word “intrinsic” without first clarifying their sense. This doesn’t always matter, but sometimes does. For example, I find certain things intrinsically valuable in the second sense — drawing, reading Kurt Vonnegut, and listening to Porcupine Tree — which would not be intrinsically valuable in the first sense in some situations. Yet the present discussion which centers on these concepts will turn in part upon the sense of the word being used with respect to libertarians and the intrinsic value of liberty. In the second sense, I would agree with Brian that both liberty and democracy are of intrinsic value to a genuine libertarian. In the first sense, I would say something different — namely, that liberty may be held intrinsically, but democracy need not be.
For my part, I don’t know what the answer is when it comes to Joe Libertarian. These are fairly deep-cover examinations that address an underlying ethos which isn’t always obvious to the eye, let alone satisfying to the ideology. I’ve run into self-described libertarians who care about democracy, those who care more about liberty than democracy, and those who don’t seem to care at all about democracy. I feel fairly comfortable saying that, for those who pay the slightest attention to how the world works, the last category includes those who aren’t really libertarians at all — at some threshold, if you don’t support democracy, then you can’t be serious about supporting liberty. In this case, though only this case, I would agree with Brian that there’s something quite implausible afoot there.
I’m not sure whether or not democracy is necessary to libertarianism, though. It depends on one’s sense of ‘necessity’, and runs into the usual troubles of trying to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for something so amorphous as an ideology.
But putting that aside, it really does seem as though a libertarian could intrinsically value liberty and not intrinsically value democracy, simply because of that impractical possibility that there might be a Benevolent Dictator. The ideology itself could say that the Benevolent Dictator would be just as fine as any other form of government, because our information about the unlikelihood of such a dicatator existing comes not from the ideology (or the ethos of values which generate a political agenda) but rather from some extra facts about the social universe.
I suppose a libertarian cannot espouse a completely negative conception of freedom, insofar as some restraint by formal authorities may be necessary for the maintenance of the market. For example, certain restraints on individual freedom are necessary conditions for the existence of markets. Robbery, extortion, embezzlement, and fraud must all be kept down to sustainable levels. In a world without formal government, merchants will likely finance their own security forces (as they sometimes already do, to fill in gaps in formal government protection). And herein lies what seems to me the libertarian dilemma: Government is *by definition* an external restraint on individual preferences. In fact, any norm-enforcing process restricts individual freedom.
The question then seems to be: how do we organize government so as to maximize individual subjective preferences?
Norm-enforcement may occur whenever individual preferences do not comport with prevailing norms, giving rise to the possibility of factional and majoritarian oppression. Homogenous norm communities would seem to be the solution, akin to Quaker towns and hippy communes, each with a separate government enforcing its own local norm-set. This would seem to reduce majoritarian oppression by lessening the occasion for enforcement, and hence restraint.
But because of economies of place and scale, trade between homogenous norm-communities will probably be irresistible. And whereever purposive human action takes place, such as commerce, and especially where objects of value are implicated, the risk of thwarted expectations exists. We would therefore expect the same incentives as operate within groups to incentivize formation of a norm-enforcement-apparatus between groups (with communities perhaps pooling resources in order to have their emerging norms of trade enforced against bandits and hucksters). Importantly, notice the relative independence of the inter-community commercial norms from the intra-community norms, and the concomitant independence of their respective enforcement mechanisms: one community can enforce book-burning, and the other a free press, and even though each may disdain the other’s practices, their shared norm-enforcement-apparatus functions only to regulate trade, a norm-set on which they agree.
I think herein lies the wisdom of federalism, which operates to compartmentalize norm-enforcement so that decisions are reached at the appropriate level of consensus. For example, prior to the 14th amendment of the US Constitution and its substantive due process gloss, it’s my understanding that any individual state could enact a state religion. Yet the national government was explicity denied this power. Does this distribution of norm-enforcement make sense? Imagine for a moment that every state establishes the majority religion within its borders as state law. It seems likely that this distribution will lead to mathematically less oppression (ie, unwanted interference with contrary subjective preferences) than if a single religion were enshrined by a national majority. However, this does not imply that a national government should’t exist at all. Where certain norms are relatively stable across communities, the empowerment of a superordinate norm-enforcement-apparatus to enforce those shared norms will likely lead to economies of scale and even prevention of positive harms (such as coastal states charging extortionate rates to landlocked states for use of ports). This option may be superior to reliance on the less stable mechanisms of evolving, game-theoretical cooperation. [Think family feuds vs. courts of law, or Israel-Palestine vs. California-Texas.]
So to the extent (and only to the extent) that federalism reduces the need for norm-enforcement, I would posit that it is an intrinsic good from a libertarian perspective. [Note that federalism is not an intrinsic good for all individuals. Those who harbor theocratic inclinations, for example, might prefer that norm-enforcement be increased if the number of converts were to rise.]
In a related sense, to the extent that democracy promotes the enforcement of more pervasive norms over lesser, I would posit that it is an intrinsic good from a libertarian perspective.
The tension inherent in the libertarian ideal seems to be definable as follows: On the one hand, power must be compartmentalized to the extent necessary to minimize gratuitous norm-enforcement(and hence interference with subjective preferences). On the other hand, power may need to be vested in more expansive governmental structures in order to enforce an orderly and fair market economy. Such a superstructure, when coupled with democracy, ensures that no vote’s norm-wielding power ventures farther than need be.
—
A final thought: should certain norms be totally banned from government (ie, group) enforcement at any level? I would posit that religion is an example, but this opinion is itself a norm. Insofar as this (meta?)norm prevails, freedom of religion should flourish, along with religious experimentation, etc., which should maximize preference-satisfation and hence accord with libertarian ideals. But perhaps certain costs are incurred as well, such as (possibly) relaxed morality, which may be a basis of honest participation in the market. And the desire on the part of the theocrat to have his meta-norm enforced (ie, the norm that parochial religious norms should be widely enforceable) is thwarted as well. At some point I suppose group force must yield to persuasion.
Matt, I’m not sure what sense you’re using the word “intrinsic”. If you make arguments like “x is only valuable insofar as it furthers y”, then it seems quite clearly instrumental.
It is inevitable that some things will be taboo’ed in human societies, and it is good that certain norms are totally banned from government enforcement, i.e., slavery. More directly in reply to your point: while I believe that religious and economic organizations ought to have no special influence on the functions and procedures of the state, this is probably not ever going to happen.
Ben-
I guess I’m using the word ‘intrinsic’ in Dewey’s narrow pragmatic sense, in that a libertarian individual making the decision of how best to organize government, ex ante [fixed typo - MJG] of any particular governmental act, will deem federalism and democracy goods intrinsic-to-the-decision because of all available organizing principles, they seem to be statistically better at safeguarding freedom (ie, restricting occassions for norm-enforcement).
Although ultimately I would suggest that even individual rights, not to mention democracy and federalism, are instrumentally valued by the libertarian only insofar as they promote individual liberty. Rights are social constructs that, when invoked, stay the hand of the group’s norm-enforcement-apparatus. The preserved entity is a certain freedom of action. If we assume that the background technological and biological realities of our present world remain somewhat stable, thse goods become intrinsically valued in the axiological sense (ie, always valued), because the background situation itself is stable. But this may not hold for all time. Society may one day voluntarily submit to the rule of artificial intelligence, for example.
[Editorial correction: the phrase “ex post” in the preceding post should read “ex ante”. My apologies!] - Fixed in post above. Manfred.
Hello Professor Berkey!
Your points are insightful and thoroughly developed. I agree with your view. Capitalism promotes the unequal distribution of wealth and wealth provides the means to lobby government to ensure regulations that will favor the maximization of corporate profits, which is the first priority of businesses in a capitalistic market.
If Government views its role as addressing social problems, then it is a true statement that capitalism and responsible government are incompatible. However, if Government views its role as protecting free competition in the marketplace, and a priority over the will of the people, then they are not only compatible, but in fact dependent upon one another.
It would be almost impossible to prevent the government from regulating business affairs in a capitalistic society and reciprocally, to prevent corporations from influencing government. In my opinion, Government views its role as fostering a strong economy in which capitalism operates at the maximum capacity. Under this philosophy, favored outcomes must be achieved through corporate intervention to ensure the will of the people is second in priority to the effectiveness of a free market society.