by Phil Parvin
‘It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.’
Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister (1940–45 and 1951–55)
It is inevitable that a chapter this length will raise more questions than it answers. What is certain, however, is that the nature and persuasiveness of democracy is not as self-evident as many academics, politicians and political activists may initially believe.
Key ideas
Democracy: A contested term, defined in many different ways, broadly understood as a system of politics in which ultimate power (or ‘sovereignty’) lies with each and every individual citizen equally, and that political institutions and the people who work in them are accountable to the people.
Deliberative democracy: A relatively recent re-conception of democracy, particularly popular among contemporary liberals, which understands democracy as describing a process of collective deliberation among free and equal individuals rather than a particular set of institutional or constitutional structures.
Radical – or ‘agonistic’ – democracy: A conception of democracy, associated with the work of Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau and Bonnie Honig, which rejects the idea (found in deliberative democracy) that reason can transcend or resolve deep disagreements about moral, political and ethical matters in order to provide grounds for substantive agreement on decisions about politics.
Direct democracy: The idea that democracy requires the active participation of citizens in decision-making, unmediated as far as possible by external organizations, institutions or representatives. Draws on ideas associated with civic republicanism.
Representative democracy: The most widespread conception of democracy, arising as a consequence of the growth and increased diversity of political communities as they moved from cities to nations, in which the citizen body elect a body of professional representatives tasked with engaging in the business of government on their behalf.
Dig deeper
David Beetham, Democracy (Oxford: One World, 2005).
Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001).
Phil Parvin and Declan McHugh, ‘Defending Representative Democracy: Political Parties and the Future of Political Engagement in the UK’, Parliamentary Affairs 58 (2005), pp. 632–65.
Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein, Better Together: Restoring the American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
Gerry Stoker, Why Politics Matters: Making Democracy Work (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Fact-check
1 What is the literal meaning of ‘democracy’?
A Rule by the people
B Rule for the people
C Rule by the best
D Rule by the monarchy
2 What is direct democracy?
A The idea that decision-making should be directed at the most pressing problems
B The idea that decision-making should provide direction to the state
C The idea that all people should be directly involved in decision-making
D The idea that decisions should be unanimous
3 What is representative democracy?
A The idea that democracy best represents how people actually make decisions
B The idea that democracy is representative of political processes around the world
C The idea that decisions should be made by the best-qualified people
D The idea that decisions should be made by representatives of the people
4 What is the ‘tyranny of the majority’?
A The problem that, in a democracy, only the majority’s view counts
B The problem that, in a democracy, the majority can act unjustly
C The problem that, in a democracy, minority groups can find themselves unable to influence policy
D All of the above
5 How have liberals tried to resolve the tension between democracy and justice?
A By rejecting democracy
B By rejecting justice
C By introducing constitutional safeguards to prevent unjust decision-making
D All of the above
6 What sort of democracy do Britain and the USA have?
A Direct democracy
B Representative democracy
C Deliberative democracy
D Agonistic democracy
7 What is the difference between deliberative and agonistic democracy?
A Agonistic democracy rejects deliberation
B Agonistic democracy rejects the rule of the people
C Agonistic democracy rejects the need to reach consensus
D All of the above
8 What is the difference between deliberative democracy and representative democracy?
A Deliberative democracy focuses on process rather than on institutions
B Deliberative democracy requires people to try to reach consensus
C Deliberative democracy encourages compromise
D All of the above
9 What is wrong with democracy, according to thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle?
A It is based on the false notion that people are equally fit to rule
B It is based on the false notion that freedom is important
C It is based on the false notion that people enjoy politics
D It is based on the false notion that politics is about power
10 Which of the following are required for a polity to be a democracy?
A Elections
B Written constitution
C High levels of political engagement
D None of the above
7
Rights
Most readers of this book will support the idea of rights, particularly human rights. The idea that there are certain things that people may not do to one another, and that these limits should be expressed in the language of rights, has become deeply engrained in the political culture of Western liberal democratic states. Moreover, human rights have been adopted by the United Nations and other bodies as providing the basis for standards of international justice. Documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulate the limits of what can be done by individuals to other individuals in the name of faith, or community values or traditions, but they also impose constraints on what states can do to their own people. Human rights are therefore different to legal rights: they are not derived from laws but are held by all individuals regardless of the laws which happen to exist in any country and regardless of the particular traditions or values which shape the public culture of those countries. Rights are therefore controversial.
What implications do rights have for our theorizing about politics? What are their strengths and weaknesses? It is not possible to offer a ground-up defence of rights here. Such a defence can be pieced together throughout this book, in particular the chapter on global justice, in which we discuss the idea of liberal universalism in some detail. In this chapter, we focus on the role rights have played in contemporary debates about justice, and in the doctrine of liberalism more generally.
Two liberal arguments in defence of rights
DWORKIN’S ‘RIGHTS AS TRUMPS’
Liberalism is committed to protecting the individual from tyranny. It does so by establishing constitutional checks on the power of the state and on the power of the community at large. In doing so, liberalism holds the interests of the individual as sacrosanct, and rejects the idea that the interests of the individual can be overridden by the interests of the state or the community as a whole. These constitutional checks are often (but not always) framed in terms of rights: things which all human
beings hold on account of their basic humanity which cannot be denied or overridden by other considerations. This general approach is most obviously embodied in Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism (which we will discuss later).
However, perhaps the most influential liberal account of rights was presented by Ronald Dworkin in his ‘Rights as Trumps’ (Dworkin 1984). Dworkin’s basic assertion is that rights act as trumps over any justification for communal decisions. A trump is something that beats, or overrides, other considerations. So, by calling rights trumps, Dworkin is saying that a right overrides other considerations or interests. Imagine, for example, that a government wants to prevent its citizens from expressing opposing political views. We might respond that to do so would violate the right of free expression. The effect of our response would be to assert that free expression must override the will of the government. The right to free expression trumps the government’s desire. Or, imagine if a society democratically agreed to execute all members of a minority group. We could appeal to that minority’s right to life as a tool to defend their interests from the interests of the society as a whole. By saying that the minority has a right, we are saying that it must trump, or override, the community decision.
For Dworkin, this feature is true of rights by definition. His claim is that it is part of what we mean by a right that it must have overriding importance. Indeed, this often is the common usage of the concept of rights. A bill of rights is a statement of the fundamental interests of citizens which the state may not infringe. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is intended to limit the powers of states, to set out what they may not do to their citizens and what they must provide for them. The idea here, then, is that human rights trump other interests or wishes of states. Human rights override state sovereignty.
‘Rights […] are best understood as trumps over some background justification for political decisions that states a goal for the community as a whole. If someone has a right to moral independence, this means that it is for some reason wrong for officials to act in violation of that right, even if they (correctly) believe that the community as a whole would be better off if they did…’
Ronald Dworkin, ‘Do We Have a Right to Pornography?’, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 359.
Importantly, for Dworkin, rights override even other moral considerations. If a proposed system or principle of morality tells us or allows us to do something that violates someone’s rights, then the rights must take precedence. As an example, Dworkin considers the moral theory of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, as we see in Chapter 9, is the theory that morality or justice depends on maximizing happiness, or utility. For a utilitarian, the right thing to do is the thing that maximizes overall utility. Dworkin, like Rawls and other liberals, argues against utilitarianism, claiming that individual rights stipulate things that we cannot do to people even in the name of increasing general utility.
The obvious question is how to justify this idea that rights override other moral principles. Logically speaking, there are two possible answers. First, we could say that rights override other moral principles or theories because they are justified by a different, more important principle. So, if our moral theory is based on the principle of maximizing overall utility, we could say that rights are based on a different principle which is actually more important than utility – perhaps the principle of respect for individuals and their interests. Alternatively, we could say that rights override other moral principles because rights are actually implied by those other moral principles. In other words, if we understood our moral principles properly, we would see that they require us to respect individual rights. Dworkin proposes this second approach, arguing that rights should trump even utilitarian conclusions, because utilitarian theories in fact presuppose a prior commitment to rights.
The reason for this, he argues, is that utilitarianism embodies the idea that the preferences of each and every individual should count equally, and that no individual’s preferences should be considered more or less important in decisions about how the state or individuals should or should not act. To stop the interests of some receiving unequal consideration, Dworkin argues, it is necessary to assert the right of each and every individual to have their preferences considered on an equal basis with others.
NUSSBAUM, RELIGION AND CONFLICTING RIGHTS
Dworkin argues for a liberal, rights-based morality so as to protect individuals from injustices arising from prevailing opinions. Rights therefore protect against the tyranny of the majority. This majority may be society as a whole, or it may be the majority in some particular cultural group. Martha Nussbaum argues, in Sex and Social Justice (Nussbaum 1999), that rights should protect individuals from injustice perpetrated in the name of religion or culture.
Nussbaum argues that the fact that a particular religion sanctions certain acts does not serve to excuse those acts, if they contravene liberal rights. Broadly speaking, religious communities living within liberal democratic states must constrain the pursuit of their religious beliefs and not violate anyone’s individual rights. For example, religious groups which hold that women are inferior to men, or which seek to enforce strict gender roles which entrench sexist attitudes, or which hold illiberal views regarding homosexuals, are nevertheless required to conform to laws ensuring equality. So the liberal state would protect the right of Orthodox Jewish women to seek legal divorce and equitable reparations even though Orthodox Judaism bans women from seeking divorce. Similarly, the liberal state would not uphold claims by Muslim groups which hold that homosexuals should be punished on account of their sexuality.
‘I understand a human right to be a claim of an especially urgent and powerful sort, one that can be justified by an ethical argument that can command a broad cross-cultural consensus, and one that does not cease to be morally salient when other circumstances render its recognition inefficient. A human right, unlike many other rights people may have, derives not from a person’s particular situation of privilege or power or skill but, instead, just from the fact of being human.’
Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 87.
But there is a tension here. Liberal rights are supposed to enshrine the basic liberal claim that the state should, as far as possible, allow individuals to decide for themselves what kind of life they want to lead. And so rights have been invoked by many liberals as a protection against religious persecution. That is, liberal rights specifically protect the right of all individuals to practise their religion, and to live their lives according to traditional religious teachings. But what happens when the right to practise religion conflicts with other rights? The issue of conflicting rights is an important one. Often an appeal to individual rights will not solve acute moral dilemmas so much as open other complex issues. How should states adjudicate conflicts between the rights of children and their parents, for example, or the clash between the right to free speech and the right to be protected from slander or hate speech? The idea that normative questions can be resolved by an appeal to individual rights ignores the fact that many rights conflict.
This is a real problem with rights-based moralities. On the specific case of religion, however, Nussbaum is clear in her defence of what is a dominant (but not unanimous) view among liberals: if a religion conflicts with other human rights then, she states, the other human rights should take precedence. This is because the bearers of rights are individuals not groups: the right to freedom of religious exercise should be taken to apply to each individual person, not to a religious group and, hence, religious groups do not have the ‘right’ to force their members to adopt certain values or engage in practices with which those individual members disagree.
Are rights too individualistic?
Dworkin and Nussbaum both use rights to distinguish between the interests of ‘the individual’ and the interests of ‘the group’, giving priority to the former. For liberals like them, therefore
, rights are necessarily individualistic. But many critics of liberalism have rejected rights as too individualistic.
There are two main ways in which theories of rights have been criticized for being overly individualistic. First, rights-based moralities might be wrong in emphasizing the good of the individual over the good of the community. Second, rights-based moralities might be wrong in assuming that individuals themselves do not value community.
THE GOOD OF THE INDIVIDUAL VS. THE GOOD OF THE COMMUNITY
Rights ensure that the interests of the individual can override the interests of the community. However, although there are cases where we might think that this prioritization of the individual is correct, there may be other cases in which we think that the greater good should prevail. Indeed, there are many cases in which we might think that it is right to put the good of the community above the good of a particular individual or group of individuals.
‘[T]here are no… rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns. The best reason for asserting so bluntly that there are no such rights is indeed of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no unicorns: every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed.’
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 69.
For example, consider the philosophical example of the ticking time bomb scenario. You are the chief of police of a major American city, and you have apprehended and detained a known terrorist. Imagine, further, that this terrorist has informed you that he has hidden a time bomb that will explode in one hour in a highly populated area of the city. Given the size of the city, it is all but impossible to find the bomb, or to evacuate the city. The question is: Are you, as chief of police, justified in authorizing the torture of the terrorist in order to find out the location of the bomb and, hence, save many innocent people?