Philosophy of Democracy

What it asks

Two kinds of defence are available and they pull apart.

The instrumental defence says democracies produce better decisions - they aggregate dispersed information, correct their own errors, and cannot ignore the governed indefinitely. That is an empirical claim, and if a better method were found it would license abandoning democracy.

The intrinsic defence says that being ruled without a say is a wrong regardless of the outcome, because it treats a person as less than an equal. That survives bad outcomes and has to explain why the wrong of being outvoted is so different from the wrong of being ruled.

Plato put the objection first and it has never been answered to everyone's satisfaction: on any other matter we consult those who know.

The recurring problems

The competence objection. Voters are demonstrably ignorant of much that they decide. Every response - that errors cancel, that aggregation works, that competence is not the point - concedes something.

Aggregation. Arrow proved in 1951 that no method of combining individual rankings into a collective one satisfies a short list of reasonable conditions. There is no neutral way to turn many preferences into one decision, which means the procedure always shapes the result.

Majority tyranny. A majority can vote to oppress a minority, and the procedure will have been followed perfectly. Constraints on what majorities may do are essential and are themselves undemocratic, which every constitutional democracy manages and none justifies cleanly.

The epistemic environment. Democratic justification assumes citizens can find out what is going on. Where that assumption fails, the arguments fail with it, and they fail quietly.

How it developed

Athens practised it and its most famous philosophers criticised it. Plato's charge was that steering a state is a skill and that entrusting it to those without the skill is like choosing a pilot by vote.

For two thousand years democracy was a minority arrangement with few defenders. Its modern justification was built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Condorcet supplied the first mathematical argument: under certain conditions, a majority of moderately reliable voters is very likely to be right.

Mill and Tocqueville added the warning that has stayed attached ever since - that the danger is not only bad government but the pressure a majority exerts on opinion itself.

Arrow's theorem in 1951 changed the terms by showing that the aggregation problem is formal rather than practical. Deliberative theories from the 1980s responded by shifting the emphasis from counting preferences to forming them through public reasoning, which is the dominant framework now.

The positions within it

Instrumental and intrinsic justifications; deliberative democracy; epistemic democracy, which defends it on the grounds that it tracks truth; epistocracy, which holds that competence should weight political power; agonistic approaches that treat conflict as constitutive rather than a failure. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

The field has become urgent in a way it was not thirty years ago, when the question looked settled and the interesting work was elsewhere.

Epistocratic arguments are being made seriously and answered seriously. Work on the epistemic preconditions of democracy - what a public needs in order for the arguments to hold - is the most active area, and its findings are not encouraging.