Arneson on Democracy
Courtesy of Online Papers in Philosophy, Richard Arneson has posted Democracy Is Not Intrinsically Just, forthcoming in Justice and Democracy, ed. by Carole Pateman, Keith Dowding, and Robert Goodin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Here is a taste:
- In Bertolt Brecht’s glorious Communist propaganda play The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a character who is a mouthpiece for the author declares that “things belong to people who are good for them.” In other words, you are entitled to ownership of some item only if your exercise of ownership promotes the common good. This should be understood to be a maximizing doctrine. If one person’s ownership of land prevents another person from using the land more productively, the first is wasting resources. At this point in the play what is at issue is rights to use land, but later the same point is applied to politics. The wily judge Azdak displays Solomonic wisdom and demonstrates that it is a grave misfortune for the country that his political rule is coming to an end. Political power rightfully belongs to those people who are good for it.
I am an egalitarian liberal and a democrat, not a communist, but I accept the principle of political legitimacy that Brecht espouses. Systems of governance should be assessed by their consequences; any individual has a moral right to exercise political power just to the extent that the granting of this right is productive of best consequences overall. No one has an ascriptive right to a share of political power. Assigning political power to an hereditary aristocracy on the ground that the nobles deserve power by birth is wrong, but so too it is wrong to hold that each member of a modern society just by being born has aright to an equal say in political power and influence, to equal rights of political citizenship and democratic political institutions. The choice between autocracy and democracy should be decided according to the standard of best results. Which political system best promotes the common good over the long run? Many types of evidence support the conclusion that constitutional democracies produce morally best results on the whole and over the long run, but this judgment is contingent, somewhat uncertain, and should be held tentatively rather than dogmatically. In some possible worlds, probably some past states of the actual world, and possibly in some future actual scenarios, autocracy wins by the best results test and should be installed. Democracy is extrinsically not intrinsically just.